WORDS & PHOTOS BY CHRIS TIESSEN
‘You guys produced this for Porsche?’, I ask Damian excitedly – running my hands along the top and sides of a large, completely rigid white box branded with the insignia of that most iconic German car manufacturer. Damian nods affirmatively, picks up the weighty package, and carefully opens its smooth lid – revealing a beautifully-mounted poster of a bright red Porsche Cayman (cradled in laser cut foam) inside. ‘From what I understand,’ Damian tells me, ‘Porsche Canada presents every new customer with a poster like this featuring the car they just purchased.’ He continues: ‘We produce the boxes that house these posters.’ As I inspect the enticing artefact, Damian chuckles: ‘While Porsche customers aren’t likely to physically unbox their new cars, these packaged posters give them the thrill of at least unboxing a gorgeous image of their new machine.’
Ah, yes. The emergent phenomenon of unboxing – a one-time mundane and even irksome practice (have you ever tried unboxing an SD card, for instance, without the help of special tools?) that’s been elevated to a near-religious experience by influencers across all social platforms. Apple phones. Leica cameras. Rolex watches. All are products whose design teams have, in recent years, elevated their box game to the point where consumers pay nearly as much heed to these products’ packaging as they do to the products themselves. It’s a trend that has Damian McDonald, President of Ampersand, paying attention – and investing heavily.
‘It’s a growing market,’ Damian tells me when I ask why Ampersand, a family-owned print shop that’s been serving the Guelph market (and well beyond) for almost fifty years, has entered the rigid box packaging game.
‘While there are established outfits overseas that have been doing packaging like this for years,’ he explains, ‘turnaround times to North American customers – especially since the pandemic – have become a major issue. And so we’re solving that problem.’ Ampersand has been serving clients like Beadle & Grimm’s, for instance – a producer of premium edition Dungeons & Dragons box sets whose business took off during pandemic lockdowns (when folks turned to games to pass the time indoors) – who needed to fulfill orders fast. And Blue Star Nutraceuticals – a human performance company looking to up their branding game with slick rigid box packaging. And Porsche Canada. And more.
While Damian leads me from his office to the shop floor, he continues: ‘Since the pandemic, we’ve invested close to a million dollars in state-of-the-art machines to work on these specialized projects. As it stands, we’re the only business in Canada that’s able to design, produce, and fulfil orders for rigid box packaging.’ When we reach the shop proper – an expansive warehouse space filled with printing equipment and stacks of blank sheets and boxes of finished jobs and everything in between – Damian, with a hint of pride, points out the large pieces of equipment that enable Ampersand to produce rigid box packaging, from start to finish. At one machine an Ampersand staff member oversees a laser cutter capable of precisely incising a full range of items: rigid box panels, puzzle pieces, foam inserts. At another, box panels are shaped and fashioned together in an intricate fashion that, frankly, leaves me completely baffled – and impressed.
While I’m genuinely enthralled by this new packaging set-up, my attention is soon drawn to a much larger, louder machine that fills most of the middle portion of the Ampersand shop: the business’ Mitsubishi forty-inch offset press. I feel an affinity for this monster. After all, it (literally) transforms each issue of TOQUE from a bunch of my hopes and dreams (writing, photography, more) into the physical object you’re holding in your hands. And it does this at sixteen thousand sheets an hour. ‘There’s my buddy,’ I think to myself, while I make my way across the shop floor towards the behemoth.
At the front of the Mitsubishi, press operator Paul Rankin pulls sheets off the rollers for quality control – laying each page on what looks like a large white drafting table and inspecting it under a loupe. Paul and I greet each other with a smile and a wave. We’ve spent our fair share of time together – peering closely at magazine covers and interior pages as we attempt to achieve that perfect colour balance, sharpness, exposure, and other elements of large-scale printing that keep me (maybe both of us) up at night.
‘If I’m not mistaken,’ I shout to Damian, ‘this press has pushed through well over ten million TOQUE pages over the years.’ As the words come out of my mouth, the number amazes me. My life on paper. My life working with Ampersand. ‘It’s certainly been our workhorse,’ Damian replies. Indeed, despite the challenges that have faced the traditional print industry, offset printing still accounts for eighty percent of Ampersand’s business – and is what Damian cut his teeth on as a pre-teen when his father, Mike, ran the business. ‘I was running the duplicator when I was just twelve years old,’ Damian recalls of his early days growing up in the industry. ‘I remember my nanny collating perfect bound books in the back of the shop,’ he adds with a laugh.
Back then Ampersand was located in Guelph’s Trafalgar Building – one-time hub of so many great Royal City enterprises (including Hillside Festival, Guelph Jazz Festival, Blue North Strategies, Lind Design, and more). Even further back, Ampersand was located in a single room in a century-old red brick at Eramosa and Arthur – which just happens to be the current office of TOQUE. What a small world. ‘Back then’ Damian remarks, ‘my dad burned plates with a ninety-watt bulb.’ A far cry from their current sophisticated set-up – and its ever-growing team. At the time of this interview, Ampersand is in the midst of acquiring the commercial printing division of Kitchener’s Innovative Design & Print Inc – which will double its number of staff to almost fifty.
This makes me happy. In an age when TOQUE has witnessed so much decimation in the print industry (to the point where, during the pandemic we worried that we might not be able to secure paper at all), I’m pleased to know that Damian and the Ampersand team are healthier than ever. When I express this sentiment, Damian cautions that their success didn’t happen without some massive risks. There was the investment in rigid box packaging, for sure. But also another investment – one that hits much closer to home. ‘When the pandemic first started making waves across the industry,’ Damian tells me, ‘I made the decision to purchase just shy of a million dollars of paper, to keep Ampersand operating (and to keep customers’ businesses operating) through a period of almost-inevitable global supply chain issues.’ Indeed, the paper that Damian purchased back in 2020 just happened to be the only suitable (and still affordable) paper in North America that TOQUE was able to secure to print its last few issues.
One of the compelling epithets that has expressed the heart of what TOQUE is about has been, and remains, ‘Print is not dead’. Damian would live by this, too. As he and I walk back from the shop floor to his office, I have no doubt in my mind that his strategic vision and business acumen are what have kept Ampersand at the forefront of our region’s print enterprises. Embedded in the Damian’s success story is another tag expressed implicitly by both Ampersand and TOQUE, that celebrates not only the joy of reading, but also the tactile pleasure that comes with print’s invitation to embrace touch in this ever more ephemeral world. Print, after all, asserts that we can still take pleasure in things we are able to hold in our hands.
Ampersand
999 YORK RD, GUELPH ON
ampersand.ca