"We're already servicing all parts of the globe, including the UK and the rest of Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America and we'll bring this product to those markets," MPX national sales manager Dan Lawellin told PrintWeek.

MGX partnered with Convertible Solutions on MAX Impact line, which can be used for hang tags, business cards, loyalty membership cards and direct mail postcards.

MGX was founded more than decade ago largely on the belief that commercial printing was going digital in a big way. "The digital market is exploding like no other," said Lawellin. "What we're seeing with brand owners and direct marketers is they are taking their traditional offset business and their traditional flexo business and rolling it all into digital."

But ironically, as digital commercial print equipment makers began introducing newer presses, they also reduced the thickness of the paper that could be used in those devices.  

"The Series One Indigos, for example, could handle really thick substrates: 24mm, two-sided credit card thickness applications," Lawellin explained. "Recently HP has begun phasing out Series One and replacing them with Series Two and Series Three, which offer better image quality. But the unfortunate drawback to that was that the Series Two and Series Three have a reduction in thickness - the maximum thickness on their machines is 14mml or 15mm or maybe with an upgrade you could do 18mm."

Upon hearing from digital printers that they still wanted to still do 20mm and 24mm jobs, MGX decided to partner with Convertible Solutions on the MAX Impact line. "A lot of these printers want rigid substrates in order to compete for the thicker loyalty card market," Lawellin said.

Each sheet of MGX MAX Impact Stock is 12, 15, or 18mm thick, with a specialized no tack adhesive on the back of the sheet and a score down the center. When folded at the score with a typical bindery folder, the front and back lock together when cut on a guillotine cutter to create an impressive 24, 30, or 36mm card. After printing, the sheets can be UV coated to add gloss and protection, or add a thin protective lamination layer to make the card thicker and more durable.

"So now someone who has a maximum on their digital printer of say 12mm can still produce that 24mm card," Lawellin noted, adding, that MAX Impact Stock face material is already HP Indigo-certified.

MGX seems to be thriving as a digital print materials supplier, "If it's a digital box, we manufacture materials to go on it," Lawellin said. "We can do sheets and rolls, we're doing aqueous inkjet coating now, we're doing UV coating and dry toner coating for things like the Kodak Nexpress and the Oce - basically every digital press you can imagine."

As for the future, Lawellin suggested that digital will continue to gain traction simply because companies are looking to change branding and messaging far more often they may have in the past.

"Companies used to end up throwing away a lot of inventory each time they changed their message or their art work," he said. "Now because they're focused more on short runs, there's no inventory loss and they can change their artwork, or bar code, or the spec on the fly with digital."