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Kevin Kesselring is a seasoned Sales and Management professional currently serving as the Business Manager at Highcon Systems Ltd. With over a decade of experience in the industry, Kevin has honed his skills in new business development and direct B2B sales across various printing technologies including offset, flexo, inkjet, and digital printing. His expertise extends to dealer management, product segment management, and corporate branding, making him a valuable asset in navigating the complexities of the market.
In his role at Highcon, Kevin spearheads the development, sales, and support of digital cutting and creasing systems tailored for folding carton and corrugated carton manufacturers. Highcon’s innovative technology is revolutionizing the industry by addressing key market trends such as e-commerce demands, shorter time to market expectations, lower production runs, and a growing emphasis on sustainability. Kevin’s leadership ensures that Highcon remains at the forefront of these transformative changes, providing cost-effective solutions to meet evolving industry needs.
Prior to his tenure at Highcon, Kevin served as an Account Executive at Esko, where he garnered seven years of experience in consulting and quotations, further solidifying his expertise in the printing and packaging sector. With a proven track record of driving sales growth and fostering strategic partnerships, Kevin continues to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the printing industry through innovation and customer-centric solutions.
Highcon, a pioneering force in digital technology, seamlessly merges production agility with design adaptability. Catering to folding carton and corrugated converters, printers, and trade finishers, its innovative portfolio offers digital finishing solutions across diverse markets, from innovative packaging to promotional materials and labels. Anchored by the proprietary DART (Digital Adhesive Rule Technology), Highcon revolutionizes analogue finishing, bringing the advantages of digital prepress and printing workflow to the forefront.
Chris Santomassimo: Welcome to the Think Factory podcast powered by OGC Solutions. And I’m your host, Chris Santomassimo, and I’m here with a friend of mine, Kevin Kesselring, who’s the Business Manager for the Americas for Highcon. So welcome to the podcast.
Kevin Kesselring: Hey, thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me today. Look forward to this visit and get the tell it about highcon and talk about our industry and maybe find out a little about you.
Chris Santomassimo: Well, you’re the one that’s got the spotlight today, so. Okay. I’m asking all the questions here, Kevin. All right. You got it. Kidding aside, I appreciate it. No, I’m glad that we got together because Highcon is certainly been on our radar screen as a company, you know, a company to watch for sure. And, you know, we’re happy to have the opportunity to give you a chance to, you know, get out in front of the audience and talk about, you know, what’s interesting at the Highcon? I know we’re all getting ready for the Truman Show. That’s coming up next month and talking about new product lines. We’d love to hear a little bit about you and the company. You know how highcon has really evolved over the last number of years, and then talk about what’s interesting. So take it away.
Kevin Kesselring: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. No. Hopefully some people have heard of highcon, you know, because we’ve been around since 2009 and have been in the kind of a digital die cutting space. But really since 2019, 2020, we really changed the company to focus on packaging, display production. Prior to that, we were still in the market, more commercial breaks, doing cards, folders, and things like that. And we still have systems out there that are doing that every day. But I joined High in 2020 and an interesting month, and it was March of 2020. So, you know, two weeks later I was supposed to be going to Israel for an Israeli based company. As many of our industry are in and it was a big group in 2020. And with everything the changes there, everything just kept turning to two weeks to two years. So I did finally have the opportunity to go to Israel about a year ago, as fast as they’re in the sea to meet in person and all the people that I unfortunately had to do the teams and zooms and things like that. But the good thing about Icon and that focus we had on packaging it was it made sense for us because there’s more value for a company to make a box or a specialty product digitally, rather than have to do it on a cutting table or another method. And then we saw a lot of growth in the packaging market. I mean, we all get Amazon boxes on our doorways. We the subscription boxes, the cartons that you get on the shelshelf, and displays that help sell the products. And that’s basically what high costs do. We digitally convert those people. We’re starting to digitally print them and finish them conventionally. So is there has been bottlenecks in production. So I was coming around at the right time to help companies with that. So it’s it’s been good for us that we had that focus. And with this upcoming group, what we continue to do is just make it more productive, faster, bigger, better, integrating more software companies in our industry just to make it easier for companies, not just a user, to actually build it in their business.
Chris Santomassimo: So it’s a little bit better. Kevin, In terms of when you talked about a whole bunch of things in a relatively short amount of time, we’ll all go back and break it apart a little bit. But when you talk about integrating it into the business, integrating it into the right on to the press, or integrating it, you know, in a different way within the business?
Kevin Kesselring: Right now, from the very start, it would seem that, as you know, people think about it maybe in the digital dichotomy, we look at it like part of the whole production process. So when a company has a product they want to make, you know, how do we make it most efficiently? And typically, you know, they have different ways to do it, different assets that are better for based on the product, based on the trend times, based on the run length that we’ve integrated with companies like Telia’s and Esko’s in the world I’ve worked with in the past also, which introduced me to Icon because I saw the possibilities there that there was a bottleneck in there. So we’ve invented companies like that. So all the way up to the CSR and estimating level, they can say, you know what, if I had a high count of my building. Could I make this product? More economically, faster, better, and then they can choose where to go from there. And then, you know, all the way to the CAD software design and then all the way to the back end for sales. We’ve got customers that are. Selling products online every day and turning them in in days where it used to be months. And they’re doing that solely because they have that digital way to produce it. And they have that integrated order from end two to make it do it. So again, it’s a whole lot more than just a stand alone piece of equipment.
Chris Santomassimo: Yeah. So you’re really empowering those customers that are doing short runs in addition to some of the ones that are doing longer runs right off the digital pressroom. Right?
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