62 email: news@printmonthly.co.uk May / June 2024 - Issue 348 Q & A / SABINE GELDERMANN Introduce yourself and tell us about how you came to be in the industry and in your role now... I am the director of drupa within the portfolio print technologies. I joined Messe Düsseldorf in 2013 however before that I started my professional career with British trade fair organisers after university with Blenheim International and REED exhibitions being the biggest worldwide trade fair and conference organisers. At the end of the day, the trade fair business is to a certain extent in my DNA and I am passionate about the whole diverse approach when it comes to marketing, PR, and sales. It’s a great pleasure and honour being in charge of drupa, a world-leading trade fair, and trying to maintain the USP and the relevance on a global scale, and it’s working quite well. Drupa is the world’s largest show for the printing industry and has been around for over 70 years, can you tell us about its history? Absolutely. Drupa was founded in 1951 so we’re talking about a long tradition that started in Dusseldorf at that time with a strong focus on commercial print. That’s still in our DNA but as we all have seen, the industry has evolved and continuously conquered new areas of application. The ongoing digitalisation has certainly led to the fact that exhibitors and suppliers are continuously developing their portfolios and drupa is reflecting the global development intensively when it comes to new areas next to commercial print. From fiber, plastics, wood, textiles, aluminium, you name it, the industry is continuously showcasing new solutions. Something that we’ve observed coming from the commercial print side is that a lot of our exhibitors are evolving their portfolios into packaging production. Here again, we’re talking about not only folding carton, but corrugated driven by e-commerce, flexible packaging, and labels, and by that you have the direct synergy with Food, Non-Food, Pharma, and Cosmetics, so it’s a huge universe and there are a lot of opportunities to go for and we are very much looking forward to seeing very inspirational products at drupa. What size did the show start out at so we can get an idea of the scale of growth over the years? Drupa started out at the major fairground which no longer exists in downtown Düsseldorf. It then moved to the new fairground and has been there for over 40 years. We certainly started with the first event on a much smaller scale but now we’re talking about roughly 140,000sq m net, so as you can imagine it’s a huge development. We have 1,600 exhibitors roughly representing 55 nations so the industry has evolved continuously. Drupa was founded by an association in Germany and their European or German-based members like Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, Koenig & Bauer, Manroland, and so many more. It very quickly became a global place to be. From the very start, Japanese exhibitors have had a very strong presence with companies like Komori being there for such a long time. We’re talking about 73 years of existence of drupa with four-year cycles and even twice five-year cycles. It’s a long history that we’re covering and a brand that is still enjoying a huge reputation on a global scale. It’s no mean feat to organise something of this size and there’s been an eight-year in-person hiatus due to Covid. Can you tell us what you’ve been doing during this gap? Yes, with pleasure. At this time in 2020, the show was completely sold and we had intensive contact points with the whole global community. In 2021 we organised a virtual drupa that reflected the conference programme that had been prepared until we had to cancel. It would have been a shame to no longer showcase that and our absolute target has been to get touchpoints with the global community. This is why we invested heavily in a four-day purely virtual event and it was great to see KPIs in terms of reach and participation and valuable content that we shared with our worldwide community. To close the gap between cycles we continued after 2021 to launch drupa in 2022 and maintained continuously strong contact points with the industry. On a yearly basis, we launch trend reports, have a strong digital portal, update the drupa blog, publish newsletters, and reconnect via our international portfolio with our global community in order to make sure that drupa is always on the agenda of our community. Content-driven facts are relevant for the industry so drupa is not only a provider and platform for a trade fair, but we also have the target and desire to meet the needs of our customers when it comes to highly valuable knowledge transfer and that is what we are doing on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis in order to maintain contact points and this has paid off very well. PRE-SHOW INSIGHT FROM DRUPA HEAD SABINE GELDERMANN ▲Sabine Geldermann, director of drupa and Portfolio Print Technologies at Messe Düsseldorf
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