This year’s two-day customer event will take place at Sunbeam Studios in North Kensington, London on 3 and 4 November.
The historic Sunbeam Studios venue started life as the UK’s first purpose-built car factory and showroom, home of the classic Sunbeam marque, but was reborn a decade ago as one of London’s leading photographic studios, which has hosted shoots for Paul Weller, Kim Kardashian, Stella McCartney and Johnny Depp in recent months.
Duplo UK managing director Peter Jolly said that photography would be one of the themes for the event, following the firm taking on the exclusive UK agency for Photobook Technology’s (PBT) Mita range of lay-flat hardcover book production systems in 2013.
However, he said that the event had evolved to be as much about networking and a “meeting place for minds” as a technology event.
The post-press vendor is hoping to continue the year-on-year growth of the visitor numbers, with last year’s event attracting around 300 individuals.
Duplo UK marketing manager Sarah Crumpler added: “The feedback from the visitors is that the networking side of the event is very important, but we also had feedback that they wanted to see the smaller, complementary products, which are easily affordable and can be implemented straight away – so that will be a consideration in partner selection.”
The target partners and theme were largely driven by Duplo’s eight-strong customer focus group.
Duplo wouldn’t be drawn on the identities of partners for this year’s event, although it said there would be around 10 companies involved as in previous years, with some returning from previous events but also “some new faces”.
Jolly hinted that the event might also be a soft launch for some products Duplo is planning to take to Drupa next year, although he stressed the kit line-up was also still being finalised.
“We haven’t even got the kit list drawn up yet, we know what goes in will be great and hopefully inspire, but this stage [of the planning process] was more about finding the right space for people to come and enjoy the networking and surroundings.”
