The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast GBC Foton 30 Laminator at ISTE Conference

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

The Chris Voss Show Podcast GBC Foton 30 Laminator at ISTE Conference

Hi folks, it's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, thanks for tuning in to the podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. You guys are the greatest audience in the world. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on youtube.com, for it says Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button so you get all the notifications from the show on all the updates we do and all the wonderful things we review. We just got done reviewing a bunch of really cool things from the Adventure and Gear show.

Be sure to check that on the channel. Of course, the podcast as well. Tell your friends, neighbors, relatives, dogs, cats, mistresses, pool boys, tell them to subscribe to the Chris Voss show. They can go to iTunes, Google Play, iHeartRadio, Spotify. There's some new site

called Luminescence or something like that. Luminescence. You can subscribe to the show there. It's pretty much everywhereuminous or something like that, Luminous, you can subscribe to the show there, it's pretty much everywhere, let's put it that way, I mean, even your mom listens to these shows, so, I mean, she's your mom, you should listen too, anyway, thanks for tuning in, guys, we certainly appreciate it, today, we have a most excellent guest, we're gonna hear about a really cool product, we've saw at a show, it's gonna to be pretty amazing. And today we have Dan Carvot. He's the product marketing manager at ACCO Brands, where he's launched several major products for the GBC brand. He elevated each one to the number one market position in their

respective categories. People might be trying to steal him for a job now. He currently focuses on product development for education, laminations, PFS, binding, and paper handling, and new product commercialization. Welcome to the show, Dan. How are you doing, bud? I'm doing good, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. And I guess we're here to talk about a really cool product that you guys have developed at GBC. Give us some background a little bit maybe about you if you want to talk about you a little bit and then tell us about the product. Absolutely, I appreciate it. I've been working for ACCO for six years now and I started in a sales and marketing role and worked my way through digital

marketing and then about four years ago, started in product marketing. And I've been doing that for four years out of our US headquarters. I'm responsible for my categories across the entire North American continent. And, you know, it's been a ride. And I think today we're talking about one of the most exciting products I've ever worked on. To me, you know, it's a product that really revolutionizes the market that we play in. So, you know, the Photon 30, the GBC Photon 30 is a completely new way to laminate. We basically looked at, you know,

lamination as a category and anybody who's ever laminated before can tell you there really has not been any innovation in the last few decades. It has pouch lamination, there's roll lamination, and it's always been like that. A machine might be a second faster, a second slower, but that's about as innovative as the category gets. There's a lot of pain points, and we really looked at those pain points,

and we tried to see, okay, how can we make this new product address these pain points and make lamination actually easy for the consumer? Nice, man. Has anyone ever told you you look a lot like John Stamos? I have heard that once. Have you heard that? I actually had a show a couple of weeks ago. It would be weird if I say you look like John Stamos.

He's never heard that before. Anyway, probably good for your dating life. So you guys have developed this product and the website that you can take and go to is gbc.com forward slash photon F-O-T-O-N and you guys have developed the GBC

Photon 30, the world's first fully automated desktop laminator with an honor cartridge. So there's that. Absolutely. Pretty cool. So there's that. Absolutely. Pretty cool. So you guys, what show was it you guys had this that we saw it at? ISTE. ISTE, that's right.

Big Educator Show, which is really wonderful. And I didn't see so many shows in the last month. I'm not sure which, you know, I could have seen it anywhere, really, at this point. But so you guys have this desktop laminar. What customer base do you guys have? Educators, of course, is one of them, people that are working in the education sphere.

Is it mostly like colleges, or is it some of the lower grade schools? I think it's really, a lot of it is K through 11, right? K through 11, okay. So lamination is everywhere there, and teachers in particular, they love to laminate. If you think about game pieces, you know, you think about banners that they do, anything that passes through hundreds of hands, you know, in the course of a school year, you

laminate it, you can actually use it again the next year. So there's tons of lamination there. I also think, you know, it fits great in a variety of different markets. We think in what we call managed print services, you so you're if you work in an office building you likely have a managed print service site somewhere on in your office and you know those are the guys that print for you they bind your documents when you have presentations um and they laminate as well um but also anybody in the office who laminates really anyone who laminates more than you know a sheet a week if you run 10 15 sheets of paper through a

laminator this is a product you should take a look at because it'll make lamination a lot easier and i imagine you know educators are trying to get of course get their best bang for the buck my mother and my sister were uh educators for like 20 plus years and i know that they had to make every dollar and dime and paper count book, you know, because, you know, they were constantly being dialed back on their funding from legislators. So, you know, they were constantly just, you know, trying to make everything last. And probably especially when you've got a bunch of kids hands all over everything, you know, they've got food and everything the kids get into. Exactly. And, you know, the other thing that you're bringing up a good point here, I think, is

a lot of schools have these 27-inch roll machines, which are great for, like, banners and large documents. But if you run a letter-sized document through that machine, you're going to have a ton of film waste. And you just said it. You have a lot of, you know, restraints on your funding. So buying a box of film, you know, that's money that you have to take out of your budget. So you want to try to preserve as much as you can. With a machine like the Photon,

when you run a letter shot sized paper through there, you have no waste. It cuts it the perfect border and you don't waste an extra inch of film. So it's great to preserve film. So it'll run the sheet through on an eight by11 instead of having like a giant roll thing, and you just waste all that spare stuff when you run it through. Exactly, exactly. And this thing will do 30 sheet capacity. You can drop in any project. 98% time savings versus pouch laminators.

Auto cartridge system, no pouches needed. So you just put a cartridge in it and away you go. It sounds like it's really built for ease. Auto Descu, corrects messy stacks. What does that mean? So it's a Descu feature. So basically what it does when you feed the stack in and you have 30 sheets on there, sometimes the papers aren't perfectly aligned.

So the machine will automatically make sure they're aligned so that once your stack comes out the other end laminated you have the exact same border on all 30 sheets yeah i have that i have that problem sometimes but i take magnesium so everything comes out the other end fine but this is a good feature to take and have the auto just skew did i pronounce that correctly? I would call it Desque. Desque? I'm learning. I'm learning new stuff.

English is my second language. You probably should know. I can actually use that in my office because my office is a collaboration of messy stacks according to my ex-girlfriend. Let's see. It also has auto trim that makes it come

out perfect. So that probably makes sure that eliminates any waste as well because it trims it down for you and it's not running forever, right? Correct. So basically you put your stack in a 30-page feeder, it'll feed it through the laminator, laminate it, and then automatically trim it with a half- inch border on each side. So you get that look and feel that you would normally get with a pouch laminator, but without having to manually open a pouch, inserting a document, aligning it, fighting with static,

and then sitting there while the document goes through the machine. Because the machine does the work for you. You don't have to stand by it. You just drop the stack in, press run, and you walk away. I love that. That's what I love about automation and technology. It even says on your guys' website, you can save 98% of your time, which is a lot compared to manual pouch loading

and feeding. It does all the work for you so you can focus on going back and slapping those kids around. No, I mean teaching them. Teaching them. Yeah, that's what you do. You go to gbc.com forward slash F-O-T-O-N, photon. I call it a futon in our pre-show. So don't type futon. And no more pouches. It's got an auto-threading film cartridge that makes the film loading as easy as possible. You just place the cartridge in the machine,

close the lid, and it looks really a lot like kind of an old inkjet. I don't mean old, but like, you know, the inkjet printers, you put like the cartridge in it with the roll thing sort of deal. I don't know if you like that reference, but you know, it kind of looks that way when I'm looking at the open. It does. It does. I see that reference, you know. Give people kind of an idea. You know, it's got a role in it, of course. And you just put that baby in there and away you go. And it comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee.

That's good to have because, you know, you can test and everything else. Is there anything like this competitively in the market? You guys are the world's first automated desktop laminar with an auto cartridge, right? Correct. So the next kind of comparative machine, to give you an idea, is twice as big from a footprint and costs 10 times as much. Wow. Okay. So we took technology that only exists today in industrial machines that very few of us will ever see um and we our engineers did a fantastic job to kind of downsize that technology into a desktop machine and make it work into this

machine at a price point that really makes it available to consumers makes it so it can fit on a desk too it looks like absolutely those big some of those big industrial tiny machines we gotta buy a warehouse for this thing. Oh, absolutely. We got to hook it up. It's a beautiful looking machine too. It's really, it looks just like a really nice printer that you would have in your office when it comes down to it. So beautiful looking,

you know, not something that's going to look like some arduous manufacturing industrial machine. Just like, well, shouldn't that be in like a manufacturing facility or something? Exactly. I love how technology does this.

It takes all this huge, ugly stuff, and it makes it into small, compact, beautiful, efficient stuff and does a great job. What else do we need to know about this product? I mean, one of the things I just want to give you a little background on is we actually developed this machine for four years. And that's quite unique in today's world, because today, a lot of companies, what they do is, for them, it's all about we got to get a product out to market as quickly as possible, right? But you know, we're a large company. And, you know, we've been in lamination for 70 years. And we're actually the only company in the market here in the U.S. that offers anything from a $30 opening price point pouch machine all the way to a $30,000 professional, you know, almost 70-inch wide machine.

So we have a lot of expertise that we could draw on and a fantastic engineering team. A four-year development is, even for us, unprecedented. So there's a lot of thought that went into this, a lot of engineering. We did almost two years of testing in the field with users. And that kind of led us to this machine that, you know, we feel so confident in that, you know, we addressed all these pain points. The walk-in-the-way feature to me is the biggest, right? It's, you know, pressing the button, walk-in-the-way. Like, it's all about time today. You know, everybody who works for a living knows it's about time, right? How long does it take to drop

a couple of pieces of paper into a feeder? It's seconds. That's all the time that you need. It's a couple of seconds, press a button. You don't even have to wait for the machine to warm up. The machine will automatically start running once it's warmed up. So it'll warm up and you just turn on? Correct. You just press run and the machine will automatically warm up and when it's ready at the right temperature it will it will run by itself and it'll automatically detect the thickness of the machine the laminate as well so if it's three mil or five mil the machine automatically adjusts the temperature and the speed wow that's awesome sauce so um do you do you guys have a life

for this as to how many you know like some some manufacturers have a life thing or how many sheets or years or something like that? Is there any sort of thing you have on that on the unit? Those stats are always really hard because it really depends on, you know, how you use it, right? So if you run 10,000 documents a day, your life expectancy is going to be different than if you run 10 documents a week, right? So it's hard. But if you look at GBC products in lamination, our machines are built to last. If you ask educators, for example, we're the number one brand for lamination in schools. You ask them about our roll laminators, I know of customers personally who've had their machine for 15, 20 years, and it's still running strong. So, you know, if you think about a pouch laminator, usually your life expectancy is anywhere between three and five years if you use it in a normal kind of way.

And the Photon 30 can most definitely last that time. Well, I imagine there's a lot of heat that goes into this. So heat's, you know, never the greatest thing for electronics when it comes down to it. So it can process. I mean, you guys, I didn't know that you guys were the number one laminar for educators. That's awesome. No wonder you had IST. And we're actually pretty new to the show still.

We've only been there a few times, but it's a great show, and it's growing every year. Well, it sounds like you guys got a good reputation. You guys also make binders and shredders and different office products as well, too. Correct. So people can see all this stuff. You can go to gbc.com for shots. Photon,

F-O-T-O-N. It's kind of like photon lasers from Star Trek. Hey, you caught me. I'm a Star Trek nerd. I think that was P-H-O-T-O-N. It was. It was.

I've done Star Trek, but I grew up on it. Give you a little inside scoop here of why that is with an F. It's an international product launch. We launched it globally. And there's some concerns of the non-English speaking word on how to pronounce P-H. So that's why we decided on the F, because people know how to pronounce that pretty well anywhere around the world. There you go.

There you go. So the GBC Photon 30, the world's first fully automated desktop laminar with auto cartridge, runs, I guess, retail right now $799.99 currently? Correct. And how's that price point with like competing things, I guess, with the big roll? I mean, I imagine the big rollers are quite a lot more expensive. Yeah. So, I mean, the big rollers are usually over $1,000 if you go for like 25, 27-inch machines. Pouch laminators, if you compare it to like aprice point pouch machine, like a higher quality, they usually have an MSRP of around $500. But the difference is if you run 30 documents on a pouch machine, you have to insert each document manually in the pouch.

You have to align it manually, and then you have to feed each document manually through the machine. There's probably a lot of ways because you're just praying half the time. You're like, I hope I loaded this right. Oh, absolutely oh absolutely and you know copiers in the early days exactly that's a great comparison you know when you think about static as a matter you deal with plastic here so at about pouch seven you get frustrated because you can't align them right anymore um and here is literally you know it's seconds you drop your stack you press the button you walk away that's that's awesome sauce awesome sauce so it's a beautiful looking product and like we said it looks just like a a really nice copy or that or printer that you'd have on your desktop uh very elegant

looking you know it's it's not going to be something that's going to be ugly in your office looks very compact so uh it doesn't look like it takes up too much of a huge footprint. Would you say, I can't see the full scale size here, but it looks like it's about the size of, say, a desktop copier or a desktop printer. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. It easily fits on a desktop. Cool.

And you can eliminate lots of waste, which is really important. You can just stack it, go, hit the button, button and walk off and it'll do the job for you. And no more pouches. So that works out really well. Really cool product, guys. You should go check it out, gbc.com. And I imagine corporate people maybe use this some for some of their corporate things or maybe corporate trainers. I know as corporate trainers, I used to be one back in the day for one of the Bell companies.

We'd have the same problem because we'd use the same materials in training in our classrooms for sales training and stuff. Absolutely. I mean, it's really, you think about, I think people underestimate sometimes how much lamination is around us.

Like lamination is everywhere. Like you walk into a restaurant, you pick up a menu, that's lamination is everywhere. Like you walk into a restaurant, you pick up a menu that's laminated. You know, you walk into a fast food chain or a grocery store and they have graphics on the floor you walk in, that's lamination. Those are all things that we make on laminators.

I didn't even think about the menu thing, duh. Yeah, and that's a big application to menus. So really anybody who laminates, particularly standard sizes Think about the menu thing, duh. Yeah, and that's a big application to menus. So really anybody who laminates, particularly standard sizes and particularly larger volumes, like 10, 15 documents at a time, this is the machine that will really make you rethink lamination and how you've laminated in the past. I think the reason most restaurants laminate the menu is because they know you're hungry

and they don't want you to is because they know you're hungry, and they don't want you to chew on it while you're waiting for your food to come. I think that's pretty much, that's just the theory I'm running with. You know, I can see that. I can see that. It's also, you know, after you've done eating your ribs, you know, you know. Yeah. Some barbecue sauce on a piece of paper, that's, you know.

Sometimes those cooks and the waitress is taking so long to bring you that food, you're just like, I think I'll just eat the menu while I'm here. You know, it's got fiber in it, if you can break through the lamination. In there, in there. Yeah, chilies, lamination. I can hear the

baby back ribs only laminate, laminate, laminate. Jingle now. All right, guys. So check out GBC.com, Fortress Photon, F-O-T-O-N for the GBC Photon 30. World's first, oh my gosh, fully automated desktop laminator in our cartridge. I'm going to get one and just laminate stuff around the office. Can I laminate my dogs? I wouldn't advise it.

Okay. They probably wouldn't like that either. I don't think they would, no. Yeah, that's probably not going to work. What else can I laminate around here? I'll laminate my laptop so that I can't get stuff spilled. I'm always eating at my desk

and getting food and stuff. I'm going to laminate my keyboard, see if that works. If you want to use it still afterwards, that's a different question. No, will the warranty cover that? I'm just kidding. So anything more we need to know, Daniel, about the wonderful product you guys have built here?

I think another cool thing is, you know, we talked a lot about standard sizes, right? That's really what we designed this machine for. But the cool thing is it's versatile to really allow any paper size up to 11 inches wide and 17 inches long. So think about an educator. One of the most common things that we see people laminate there is bus tags. It's a great example, right?

A lot of times they're little shapes. They're a bus or they're a star. Those things get laminated. Exactly. And you can run those through because you can switch to different modes so if you have an odd size let's say a star and you're worried about the sensors not detecting the edge right and cutting off a piece of it you can switch it to an auto cut mode and then you can just feed it and as you see it exit the machine you can manually cut it

if you have thicker cardstocks, you mentioned copiers earlier. If you ever use a copier, if you have thicker cardstocks, sometimes the feeder has misfeeds because it doesn't grab the paper right. If you see that happen, you press one button, you switch to a manual feed mode, and you can feed without any misfeeds. And if you have a straight edge, you can keep the sensors on for auto cut. So it's really such a versatile machine that you can run almost any application through it. is awesome sauce and it doesn't really take any specialty software or anything like that it's pretty much standalone uh plug and play um and uh yeah pretty cool man pretty cool it's a beautiful machine i think i'll own one just to have it just so i can look really cool people would be like what's that in your office?

I'd be like, it's a laminator. That's how you impress people. Whoa. I can probably get the chicks that way. So it's a great-looking product. You can go to gbc.com forward slash photon. Get one for yourself whether you need it or not because it's just so good-looking. You can sit around on your desk, and you impress people you impress your boss you probably get like some raises or some or some

promotions by this because they'll be like well why should we make john ceo john's got the laminator he's serious about business not just any laminator not just anything you see photon 30 the world's first um so this is great for educators we've got a lot of great educators on the show they're like Not just any, he's got the PBC Photon 30, the world's first. So this is great for educators. We've got a lot of great educators on the show. We've got great teachers, some people who have run some great charities for teachers. Of course, my mom and my sister were teachers, so I have a vested interest there. And for years, I always had to listen to all the legislative cutbacks. And my mom would spend a ton of her personal money buying goods and making stuff.

Teachers are such a great underpaid, undervalued thing to our society. So all the more love and appreciation we give to them. Maybe less wars and more money in education. That would be great. A few less jets, great education, and all that good stuff. So pretty cool. Anything you want to say in parting, Daniel? You know, I think, you know, we've really talked about, you know, all the benefits.

It's all about the time, and it's about the ease of use, right? So think about how much time you can save laminating. Think about, you know, what you can do in that time. And, you know, we all have so much going on. Think about a teacher. You just talked about teachers. They do so much every day. They're running around.

And, you know, a lot of times teachers, they have to stay late because they didn't get to laminating. They didn't get to do their game board for the next day. Now they don't have to worry about it. They just do it when, you know, while they're doing other things. I remember my mom working, like, 12-hour days. Yeah. She came home late. I'm just like, didn't the school close at like 3 or something or whatever?

Exactly. You know, I had to do the homework. Exactly. You know, test whatever. And then she's like, I had to go, you know, get supplies. And, I mean, I think she at one point was spending like $250 a month of her own money getting supplies for the kids because you know she couldn't get the funding through the legislators uh but uh yeah you think about the time and and teachers put in a lot of work to their kids it really is a job of labor of love

and i wish they did get paid more but uh you know this can make their job a whole lot easier because they can uh you know laminate the stuff get it get it saved from all those kids dirty fingers and they can spend seconds doing it versus you know half an hour 45 minutes around with it wasting lamination going oh that didn't come out the other side it's pretty much my experience with every early copier when they first came out the big automated copiers i'd waste so much paper i'd be like like, stuff would come out, and you're just like, what did I? Oh, I put it in landscape instead of portrait. And we back the product with a two-year or 5,000-cycle warranty.

Oh, really? Yep. Anything goes wrong, you call us. We have a troubleshooting guide. If that doesn't help you through and our customer care team can't help you, just send it back to us. We'll send you a new one. Awesome sauce. 30 sheet capacity.

You can drop any project. 98% time savings versus your pouch laminators. Auto cartridge system. No pouches needed. Auto to skew. Corrects messy stacks. Auto trim. Comes out perfect.

And you're not going to waste a whole lot, which is good for the environment, too, which I know a lot of schools have green initiatives and they're trying to do that as well. So everyone in my audience, please go check it out. Go to gbc.com 4-photon, F-O-T-O-N. Thanks, Dana, for being on the show. We certainly appreciate you having guys come by. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. All right. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to give us a like. Subscribe to us on YouTube. hit that bell notification button, tell your friends, neighbors,

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every place you can get the Chris Bosch show. You can take and get it. Be sure to give us a like, you know, recommend the show, all that good stuff. We certainly appreciate it. And we hope you tune in next time.

Thanks for being here. We'll see you later.