Thinking Beyond Ink. Guy Newcombe, Archipelago Technology
Guy Newcombe is CEO at Archipelago Technology, which develops print solutions unique to areas such as adhesives and coatings. In this interview, we look at the fundamental environmental and efficiency needs that Archipelago’s technology is resolving, the importance of listening to what customers want, and how Guy’s years of experience in inkjet has shaped both his leadership style and Archipelago’s business model.
Can you talk a bit about your background, and that of your company Archipelago Technology?
The company started seven years ago. When we started, we were really just a group of friends who had worked together for many years. I personally had been working in inkjet for about 20 years, and before starting Archipelago I was really quite deeply immersed in the whole scene. There were four of us who got together in a coffee shop, and we decided what we wanted to do was to invent the ‘next big thing’. What we did that was different was to go out and actually ask people what they actually needed.
That team that started Archipelago came out of a Cambridge technology consultancy called TTP – The Technology Partnership. I joined TTP right at the beginning, it was my first job out of university, so I saw how their CEO, Gerald Avison, made a start-up survive and thrive. I experienced first-hand how he drove the people to build the business, and it was a very exciting time. It’s something that is hard to learn from a book – you need to see the techniques successful people use to motivate people. TTP had a model that we copied, which was ‘don’t tell people what they want, go out and find out what they need, what they are willing to pay, and create it’. If you look at a lot of very successful businesses, that is what they have done. When you look at why some businesses lose their magic, it’s because they have lost the skill of listening and inventing based on a need.
We went and spoke to about 50 different world-leading companies of the kind of status of Unilever and Coca-Cola. We had existing relationships with many companies because we've been in the industrial inkjet world for a long time, and so we knew these people quite well. We went to see them, and we said, what do you really want? It's quite interesting when you do this, you have to listen quite hard because you get a whole range of responses back. One thing that came back that surprised us was that there was a lot of interest in printing glue. It took us a while to really catch on to this because if you just took glue and put it into an inkjet head, it would bung up.
The tipping point came when I was in a room with a group of 10 very gifted technologists. They said, if you're able to build us a glue printer, then we're up for buying one. At that point, the penny dropped, and we started thinking very seriously about how we would make a glue printer. So, we got into a room and just started thinking and trying things out. Fundamentally, we needed to figure out how we were going to jet glue.
We thought, well, we’ll need a big nozzle. We’ll need lots of energy, we’ll probably need to heat it up. We’ll probably need a short fluid path. This was the core of what became Powerdrop technology.
So quite quickly, we made a Powerdrop demonstrator that illustrated we could print glue, and then we invited these guys over – as soon as they had a look, they said ‘oh, this is fantastic’. They liked something about it which really surprised us as it was something we hadn’t even realised, which was that it jetted glue very cleanly, so there was no mess, and they loved it. And true to their word, they bought the fully operating Powerdrop glue printer which we built, which we shipped, and they are now trialling in their pilot line.
Then in parallel to that, we were talking to a big, well-known manufacturing company who is a world leader in clean manufacturing. Very similarly to the other guys, we wanted to make something that they were really interested in, which was coating their products without waste. Very often the painting process, whether it's for cars, or for houses, or bridges, is terribly wasteful. You lose about half the paint.
This company said, if you can make a machine that solves this problem, we’re interested. So we agreed on a contract with them, and we’ll be shipping a Powerdrop machine later in the year. Once again, the story is, we asked people what they wanted, and invented and delivered on what they knew they needed.
How long is the development process for new Powerdrop machines?
It goes in stages. We started the business back in September 2012, which was the first time someone asked me if we could jet glue. It planted the seed in my head so that when these guys said they wanted to jet glue, I had already been thinking about it for a while. Knowing that they would buy the machine really helps the process – everybody is revved up then! Once you have made the decision, the demonstrator can be quite quick, and of course, you have to have a good team. Once you really know what they want, and they believe you can do it, and you believe you can do it, it can really roll. It’s all about meshing the need with the ability to solve the problem.
What makes Archipelago successful?
To go back a bit, before I joined TTP in 1989, in 1983 I worked as a summer student at Domino. Very similar to TTP, I saw how their CEO Graeme Minto motivated people. I was 21, and it was just amazing to see how he could transform attitudes with just a few words, and get things working. So I had direct experience, seeing these two leaders in action, and it planted the seed that I could do it too. But you need a bit more than a seed when you actually come to do it! Again, it’s really important to surround yourself with critical friends. I am surrounded by people that criticise me – I wouldn’t say non-stop, but daily!
We also have a very strong board that gives me a lot of feedback, and we have founder shareholders who are very active, and that’s really important. People say we want to be more like the US, one thing they do very well in the US is criticise people more openly, and leaders have to be able to listen and to respond to criticism. At TTP there was a culture of very open criticism, and I believe that if anyone can say anything to anybody at any time, it makes a big difference.
What’s next for your technology?
We keep talking to people all the time. Certainly, the desire to reduce waste, at the moment, makes you everybody’s friend. Everybody is talking about reducing energy, reducing carbon, reducing waste, and there are certain processes that are really very wasteful, so we are in a position to say, ‘put our machine in and it will pay for itself in six months’.
How do you determine whether your technology holds widespread appeal?
We are fortunate because we know the players in most of these industries. In food packaging for example, we know all the main players, and it’s an extremely sophisticated industry with a small number of extremely capable businesses who know what the problems are, and have been looking to solve these problems for a long time. If you can bring in something that doesn’t just solve a problem but can do it in a scalable way, e.g. a solution for making beer cans more effectively, you’ve got to be able to scale it to make 300 billion cans a year reasonably quickly. We’re able to say, our technology is at this stage and can now solve this fundamental problem. And once you have one or two reference sites, it transforms that discussion as we can demonstrate that it is being used successfully. So food packaging is a huge area for Archipelago, making furniture, making flooring, painting cars, painting bridges and all manner of outdoor painting and industrial coating. So the conversations that come up time and again are making things cleanly, low levels of waste, solving longstanding environmental issues around waste and recyclability.
Why is it your business in particular that is solving these problems? Are others not listening to what businesses want?
Good question. Take these big packaging companies, they know their problems, but the number of people who can actually solve these problems is very small. They are often too close to the problems to solve them, and in a way, other companies have become over specialised. However, if you are going to solve some quite fundamental problems, like jetting glue, you need to be able to put a team of people on it for about three years – the number of companies who are able to do that is astonishingly small. The likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk could do it, but they’ve got other things to do! The dynamics of it are quite fascinating. We also need to be able to listen to what people want, prioritise, and a certain amount of luck is involved when it comes to businesses trusting that you can deliver, and then you need to be able to scale. Also, you need confidence in your company’s abilities and confidence in your customers.
Who does Archipelago work with?
Our customers are big companies – unfortunately, I can’t talk names, but I can tell you the areas they operate in. The paint companies aren’t really our customers, but we are close to all of them; PPG, AkzoNobel, Sherwin-Williams. We were finalists in AkzoNobel’s Paint the Future event, which was very exciting. They created a huge and very effective innovation team, to look at how Akzo was going to grow and transform the world over the next few years. So we are working very closely with paint companies.
We are speaking to the big packaging companies in metal, corrugated board, paper and plastic, they are all very interested in what we are doing. Each one of these companies is multi-billion and extremely capable. We are very close to the personal care companies, furniture companies, flooring companies. When you look at the numbers – everything is covered in paint, every room is filled with furniture, every floor is covered in flooring – these businesses are very big, and have long-standing needs which we as a company are addressing.
Do these businesses face similar challenges?
Yes – virtually everything that you buy is coated one way or another. And then often the way that it is coated is very wasteful. Take something like a beer can, you think, it’s predominantly a metal can, but a lot of the manufacturing cost of making it is in the coatings; it has one sheet of metal, but it may have about six coatings on. If you can address that cost, you can save a lot of money.
What are your thoughts on the inkjet market generally? Who do you think of as the most impressive companies in the space?
I look at companies like Domino, who have been extremely focused on keeping their customers happy. They spend huge amounts of time understanding their customers and making sure they get a high-quality service from them. Sun Chemical has also been extremely successful for much the same reason. It’s a common theme of success, Dimatix has a very well-rounded management team, they listened to what people wanted and gave it to them. It’s useful to remember that fundamentally, if you want something to take off, it needs to be relatively simple and ideally it needs to save money quite quickly, so I think people have been overdriven towards complexity – most of these successful companies make their money from simplicity. Looking at Domino, even today a huge amount of their revenue comes from their original product, and this is around 40 years on.
Another factor is the question of what is the right scale? You need to be of a size where you know your customers, and really value them. Again, if you go to too many inkjet conferences, you can get taken in by the ‘propaganda’. There is the quote that ‘in the future, everything that can be printed, will be printed’. This as a statement cannot be true, yet it is rolled out as some kind of deep truth. More money is made from mass standardisation than from mass customisation.
Look at Apple, which most would regard as a successful company, they have a market cap of around a trillion dollars, and they have about six products! They have really polished what it is that people want. Look at a beer can or a Tetra Pak carton – these are near-perfect products. One of our major areas of focus is where we can use our technology to make something better. If you say that in the inkjet world, people won’t even hear you, but if you go to these companies that make flooring, or furniture, or orange juice cartons, or beer cans, we have their attention – they are very interested.
The successful inkjet companies, of which there have been and still are many, they do exactly what we do, which is listen very carefully to what their customers need and make sure to super-serve them. Take Powerdrop, which is our core technology, it’s really just large-scale inkjet; it’s a big dot inkjet printer. You can put anything in it; paint, tomato ketchup, anything!
The quote attributed to Henry Ford, ‘if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse’ - That’s certainly not my experience. You go and talk to these people, and they are extremely sophisticated – they just want people to listen to them and give them what they want, and they know what they want.
What’s next for Archipelago – what are the company’s long-term goals?
Fundamentally, we are focused on delivering Powerdrop machines to our customers that enable them to make better products with less waste. For each customer, we hone that down to what that really means for them. It’s not simply that we are a technology company or machine builder, the cycle is we invent what our customers want, and we are continuing to invent to meet needs and deliver machines that allow our customers to do what they would like to in a more cost-effective way. It’s large-scale, clean manufacturing, and really delivering on it.