I visited Bloomingdale, Ontario, to discover how loyalty between founding family members, staff, and clients has propelled Simpson Screen Print and Lithography Ltd. through the most challenging year in the company's history to achieve record success. Keywords: Andy Warhol, banners, Carla Johanns, David Johanns, death of a colleague, decals, Dick Kouwenhoven, digital printing, Dutch-Canadians, family businesses, fine-art prints, flyers, fulfillment, Graficaza, Hemlock Printers, Henri Matisse, Holland, HP Indigo, inkjet printing, Joan Miro, Ken Danby, kitting, Komori Lithrone, labels, large-format signage, limited-edition prints, lithography, Marc Chagall, Martin Johanns, Martyn Johanns, metallic finishes, Michel Caza, Pablo Picasso, point-of-purchase displays, PrintAction, Salvador Dali, Sam Mueller, scratch-and-win tickets, screen presses, screen printing, serigraphs, SGIA, silkscreen printing, Simpson Screen Print & Lithography Ltd., Specialty Graphic Imaging Association, substrates, succession planning, The Netherlands, UV digital flatbed presses, UV inks, Victoria Gaitskell, workplace bereavement, workplace mourning

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2. Flying
Colours
Ties of loyalty
between founding
family members,
staff and clients propel
Simpson Screen Print
& Lithography to
record success
Story by Victoria Gaitskell
Photos by Clive Chan
Joe Ferguson, Carla Johanns, Martin Johanns and
John Bald of Simpson Screen & Lithography

3. APRIL 2013 • PRINTACTION • 1716 • PRINTACTION • APRIL 2013
ust as Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale
of Two Cities begins,“It was the best
of times, it was the worst of times,”
the past year has brought drastic
contrasts of unprecedented success
and profound tragedy to Simpson
Screen Print & Lithography Ltd.
I travelled to visit the company twice
at its unique 70,000-square-foot oper-
ation – running screen, litho, inkjet and toner
production – in Bloomingdale, Ontario, just outside
of Waterloo. I wanted to see for myself how their
remarkable resiliency has enabled them to emerge
stronger and more determined than ever to succeed
after the past incredibly challenging 15 months.
Building a family business
In his youth, company founder and President Martin
Johanns chose to immigrate all by himself from his
native Holland to Canada. His inspiration was that
during World War II Canada had hosted the Dutch
royal family in exile and Canadian forces had led the
liberation of Holland, events that made an enormous
impression on him. “My strength came from being
an immigrant,” he says. “I couldn’t have achieved all
I have done in Holland, where things were too regi-
mented, there was too much paperwork, and maybe
too many suggestions from family as to what I needed
to do in life.”Coincidentally, in Delft, Martin’s school-
master and mathematics teacher was the uncle of
another successful Canadian printing-company
founder: Dick Kouwenhoven of Hemlock Printers in
Vancouver, British Columbia.
While Martin studied at the University of Toronto,
he rented quarters in a farmhouse with a friend from
the Dutch army. Their landlady’s sister, Maddie,
ended up becoming Martin’s wife, an enduring love
match between creative minds that also proved
fortunate for the family business. For 200 years,
Maddie’s family ran a letterpress printing company
inAmsterdam,and her eye for good business prospects
helped Martin vet the various opportunities and
acquisitions on which he has built his success.
Martin’s most important early mentor in business
was Robert D. Schadt, who hired Martin to work
in the advertising department of Husky Injection
Molding Systems in Canada, a job that gained Martin
valuable experience in visual marketing, promotions,
film production, and plant layouts.“When talking to
clients, [Schadt] could envision the production
processes and give quotes for injection molding right
on the spot,” Martin recalls. His other earliest jobs
included working for a Rotterdam printing operation
in high school, running the Canadian in-plant print
shop for the Steinberg grocery-store chain, and sales
for several Canadian printing companies.
In 1968, with partner Jim Gough, Martin
purchased Staines Printing in Waterloo, a litho
company founded in 1936, and renamed it Johanns
Gough Graphics. “It was easier for us to become
business owners by buying an existing business than
starting from the ground up,” he explains. When
Gough retired in 1972, Martin renamed the business
Johanns Graphics. After over two decades of opera-
tion, ending with a stormy period when the shop
became unionized and then decertified, Martin sold
the company in 1987. After taking what Martin
characterizes as a major financial bath in the
stock market that fall, he bought his next venture,
Simpson Screen Printing, a small, successful screen-
printing company founded in 1963.
Whereas at Johanns, Martin had devoted himself
exclusively to sales, at Simpson he changed his focus
to pampering existing customers by returning esti-
mates within hours and delivering jobs well ahead
of schedule. He still maintains these priorities,
pointing to a recent commendation from one of his
agency clients that praises the unusual accuracy and
rapid turnaround of Simpson’s quotes compared to
other printers (a time difference of hours versus two
or three days in some cases). Martin also credits
significant contributions to the company’s growth
to some exceptional employees who came with the
company when he bought it, including account
managers Tom Shute and Vic Rempel. All things
combined,“business boomed, margins were excep-
tional for the type of work we were doing, and
within a few years I was back financially to where I
had been before,” he recalls.
Although the economy entered a recession in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, the continued prosperity
of his business required Martin to expand it in 1996
from the small Breslau schoolhouse where it was
originally located into the present 70,000-square-
foot building in Bloomingdale, near the southwest-
ern Ontario cities of Kitchener,
Waterloo, and Guelph, and an hour’s
drive from the Greater Toronto Area.
The place had been previously used by
an engineering group to house farm
equipment. It not only offered enough
room for Martin to relocate Simpson
Screen Printing, but also enabled him
to buy back Johanns Graphics (which
by then had been renamed XJG and
had gone bankrupt twice under the
new ownership), rename it Johanns
Lithography, and move it under the
same roof.
Recognizing how tricky it could be
to join two businesses together, Martin
and Maddie designed and built a
restaurant between them, a stratagem
which helped unite the litho and screen
cultures and staff. Although today the
restaurant no longer has a full-time
chef, its kitchen and dining-room remain as testa-
ment to Maddie’s gift for interior design, along with
other inside renovations that have given the company
an unusually attractive interior,filled with interesting
colours, textures, original artwork, antique printing
equipment, and amenities including a tropical fish
tank and a small skylit arboretum.
Over the years, alongside the business, Martin and
Maddie built a close-knit family of four children (in
descending birth order): Erika (a public health nurse
in Collingwood),David (a composer,sound engineer,
and jazz musician in Toronto), Martyn (pronounced
Mar-TAIN, rhymes with rain) and Carla. Although
all their children worked in the family business at
various stages, the two youngest, Martyn and Carla,
stayed most closely involved over the long term.
Mueller’s first contact with Simp-
son was a one-summer internship,
when he tried his hand at a little bit of
everything while studying at Ryerson
University’s Graphic Communications Management
program in Toronto. After graduation, he worked in
British Columbia for six years as an application spe-
cialist for CreoScitex. His job entailed helping major
customers in North America and Europe integrate the
newly created PlateMaster system and related software
products. After he moved back to Ontario for family
reasons, he returned to Simpson, initially to develop
their prepress department.
Mueller says screen printing enables Simpson to
print directly on various substrates – mostly styrenes,
Coroplasts, and corrugated materials, from thin peel-
Screen, litho, and inkjet under one roof
Martin explains that screen printing originated in
ancient China,and used to be called silkscreen printing
because the screens were made of silk.AfterWorldWar
II,the screens were made of polyester and nylon,which
could create as fine a mesh as 200 lines per inch, re-
sulting in a dramatic improvement in process quality.
Sam Mueller, Simpson’s General Manager, contin-
ues:“A lot of people think of screen printers as T-shirt
printers,but our focus in screen printing is on oversized
outdoor products, all with UV inks that are good for
two to three years in outdoor conditions,exposed to all
the elements. We also do in-store point-of-purchase
displays, large-format signage, banners and decals.”
off sticker backings to plastics up to a quarter-inch or
half-inch thick. (For thicker end products, the less
desirable alternative would be to print on thinner
materials, then mount or laminate them.) The com-
pany’s current equipment includes five screen presses
(Sias, Svecia, and M&R), a Komori Lithrone S40
H-UV/UV 6-colour plus tower coated sheetfed press
(their latest acquisition),an HP Indigo 5500,three UV
digital flatbed presses (Colorspan and HP), plus
finishing equipment. “On the digital flatbeds we can
print up to two-and-a-half-inch-thick substrates for
specialty products such as doors or MDF pegboards
for in-store displays,”says Mueller.
Improvements in inkjet technology in the last five
years have enhanced Simpson’s offerings with shorter
runs and quicker turnaround times for high-resolution
images. Some of its products also combine multiple
processes; for example,they first print scratch-and-win
tickets in litho, then apply a scratch-off metallic latex
coating by screen printing on top.Similarly,they might
use an inkjet press to apply spot colours on a screen-
printed job.
New technologies have also helped them achieve
greater accuracy and consistency in colour and ink ap-
plication between the different processes.“Typically in
screen printing, a lot of products have low resolutions
of 35 to 55 lines per inch. By contrast, we typically
print in 85 line on our largest jobs and for smaller
visuals we tend to print at 125 to 150 line. These high
resolutions allow us to achieve closer matches with
litho resolutions,”explains Mueller.
He says the company has gradually switched entirely
to UV inks for both screen and litho,enabling them to
use a wider variety of substrates on which they couldn’t
get good adhesion with conventional inks. The move
has also simplified colour management.“Store signage,
sell sheets, flyers, labeling – the colour must be consis-
tent for all these products in all three mediums –
screen, lithography, and inkjet,” insists Mueller. “We
thrive on making sure we can achieve these matches as
exactly as possible. What also differentiates our com-
pany is that everything is available
under one roof.”
Simpson’s comprehensive special-
ized services for the retail field have
secured an impressive list of clients
in the food and beverage, grocery,
liquor, beer, general manufacturing,
and insurance industries.
The careful craft
of screen printing
Every year Simpson wins awards for
quality and innovation from the Spe-
cialty Graphic Imaging Association
(SGIA, based in Fairfax, Virginia).
They executed limited-edition prints
for such distinguished Canadian
artists as the late Ken Danby and take
a decidedly artistic approach to all
their screen production.
Mueller elaborates: “We’ve done a
lot of internal research, development, and
testing on which screen angles and meshes
work best with different resolutions. With
screen printing,it’s not any one specific prod-
uct or press that determines the high quality of our
work. Rather, it’s our expertise at making careful
adjustments on things like registration, squeegee
pressure, and the durometer [meaning thickness and
hardness] of the squeegee. We also play around with
inks and emulsions, including out-of-the-ordinary
specialty inks to create glitter and metallic finishes.”
Martin explains:“While lithography has fewer than
10 variables that need to be controlled,screen printing
has over 100 variables, from mesh count, mesh selec-
tion, and mesh tension to angle rotations, ink flow,
Continued on page 26
J
The daytime staff at Simpson
in front of the company’s latest
acquisition, a six-colour Komori
Lithrone S40 H-UV press.
Sam Mueller, General
Manager at Simpson
Screen Print, first
joined the company
as a summer intern.

4. 26 • PRINTACTION • APRIL 2013
FINISHING EQUIPMENT
number of coats, lift-off pressure, and so
on.That is why you find so many operators
with art backgrounds in our field. It be-
comes a craft.”
“We’re not just producing ink on paper,”
add Mueller.“We work creatively with that
ink on every job.”
Mueller says the company has many
longtime employees who are experts at this
type of fine-tuning.“They brought a lot of
knowledge with them and have also
learned a lot on the job,because we’ve chal-
lenged them with various products other
printers have turned down because they
didn’t think they could achieve the look or
the level of quality the client required.And
when their expertise is applied to regular
jobs, it makes them pop that much more.”
By the time Martin’s son Martyn had
finished university, he was already ex-
celling at printing sales. The company’s
screen artistry took a quantum leap for-
ward after Martyn spent a six-month ap-
prenticeship at the Graficaza studios of
Michel Caza in Paris, a world-class screen-
printing operation that, besides commer-
cial clients, has collaborated with such
famous artists as Pablo Picasso, Salvador
Dali, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Joan
Miró, and Andy Warhol.
“Martyn returned from Paris with a
passion and very quickly moved our busi-
ness into 4-colour screen printing with 200
line,” says Martin. “When solving prob-
lems,Martyn was able to think outside the
box. He got us into the major retailers by
never saying‘No, we can’t do it.’Instead he
would always say. ‘We’ll figure it out.’ In
2011,when PrintAction covered Simpson’s
installation of the HP Indigo 5500, both
Martyn and the business were thriving.
A deeply tragic loss
Unexpected tragedy struck on 9 January
2012 when Martyn passed away at age 44.
“He was always ambitious and person-
able,” reminisces Mueller, who worked
closely with Martyn for 10 years. Their
offices were side by side with a window in
between.“He excelled at building relation-
ships with clients, he had a wicked sense of
humour,loved to play pranks,had a strong
zest for life, and he clearly loved his three
children. He was always able to laugh at
himself, too, and tell everyone and joke
about it if he made a mistake
“We miss his spontaneity and practical
jokes. When he was around, spur-of-the-
moment events were always happening.
One time, when [Martin] was away, Mar-
tyn painted his dad’s office pink to surprise
him. Or Martyn would send an intern
chasing around the building in a futile
search for a pail of halftone dots.”
Despite his shock and grief, Mueller was
the person who called all the company’s
clients during the first week after Martyn’s
death to inform them of the tragedy,that he
would continue to keep in close touch with
them, and the company would continue
producing their work to the same exacting
standards as always.Many of the company’s
clients and suppliers were among the many
mourners at Martyn’s funeral.
“One of the hardest things was just to
keep going and make sure we continued to
get the work out the door.We didn’t skip a
beat as far as that goes,” recounts Mueller.
“I’m really proud of our staff for showing
they wanted to give that much extra and
continue Martyn’s legacy,his love for print,
and his love for people.”
For the first six months,Mueller became
very active in supporting the sales team,but
he has returned to managing operations
full time since they have gradually brought
in other reinforcements. Eight weeks after
the tragedy, Carla moved back with her
family from St.Catharines,Ontario (where
after developing trade shows, sales, and a
Cleveland office for the family business,she
had spent the past 10 years raising her chil-
dren and obtained a Masters degree in Ed-
ucation). Relocating to Waterloo has en-
abled her to manage her own and her
family’s personal and professional needs
more effectively, including a focus on revi-
talizing the local brand and new business
development.
Rebuilding for the future
“The way I battled through all the intense
emotions was to become an aggressive ad-
vocate for a strong collective vision for our
sales department and our company, in-
creased brand awareness in our local mar-
ket, and generally much change and
innovation in a short amount of time,”
Carla recalls. One of her first tasks was to
join her father at meetings with various
companies who offered to buy them out.
Although Martin was absolutely devas-
tated by Martyn’s loss, he never surren-
dered: “When my son died, I had to take
care of his family, my family, the Simpson
families who depend on this business, and
the continuity of our relations with clients.
“I also bought a new Komori press be-
cause I felt I owed it to Martyn to move our
litho quality to the next level. Besides stay-
ing true to his vision, I needed to stay busy
and involved to deal with the loss of my son
and best friend.”
Carla confirms: “My father and I are
both extremely competitive, and our joint
conclusion was that we needed to step the
business up a notch.
“We wanted to be there not only for our
immediate family but also for our family of
employees. Martin and I wanted them to
Gaitskell
Continued from page 17
Continued on page 28
Martyn Johanns
PhotocourtesyoftheJohannsfamily

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know that we were investing in the long
haul and the next generation – not just the
Johanns grandchildren but also all the kids
and grandkids of the families working here
and our valued clients, whose support has
helped build our business – to ensure there
will be future opportunities for all of us.
My father has created far too much of a
phenomenal foundation here to see it build
anywhere but up.”
In fact,Martin confirms that despite ad-
verse events, including a struggling global
print economy,the past year has easily been
the company’s most successful year finan-
cially, with $10 million in sales.
“Somehow we’ve managed to pull
through the last year, and now I’m feel ex-
cited about the business again and about
moving forward,”says Mueller.
“I’ve learned more in the last year than
in the previous 40,”says Carla,“and one of
the most profound lessons for me is how
deeply I admire my father’s business acu-
men, and how much I loved working with
Martyn. It’s exciting to witness my dad
back at the helm putting a whole new im-
print on the business.”
She says they plan to add additional
12,000 to 22,000 square feet to their facili-
ties for expansion of their fulfillment and
kitting services. (For instance, one of their
recent lawn-and-garden kitting project for
1,500 stores in a major chain was com-
prised of styrene headers,displays,banners,
posters, shelf talkers, and channel strips.)
Martin still doesn’t find the thought of
retirement appealing.“I’m glad I’m still on
a journey that is exciting. It’s good for me
to be the president in an atmosphere of ex-
citement along with younger people.
“I’m especially glad that my daughter
has come back into the business, because
Carla can see what needs to be done and
stands up to me. Also until now I never
fully appreciated that she has unbelievable
people skills. She can walk into major
companies and come out with large or-
ders. I am rethinking the succession and
trying to bring her along as part of our
management team.”
Nowadays Martin only comes into the
business when he feels he is needed (which
sometimes can be six days a week!). He
spends as much time as possible at his farm
in Elora (enjoying his grandchildren),or his
cottage on Lake Nipissing (where in a good
blow he takes out his trimaran sailboat), or
planning a classic log home on the Irvine
River in Salem, Ontario (where at some
point in the distant future he may retire.)
He gave me a serigraph of a landscape
Martyn painted in 2002 on which the arti-
sans at Simpson collaborated to produce a
limited-edition print to honour Martyn’s
memory.(The word“serigraph”differenti-
ates a screen print produced as an artistic
work versus one produced for industrial
use.) Entitled “Northern Retreat”, it shows
a tranquil eastern view of Lake Nipissing.
“Life is like canoeing down a fast river.
You can pick your landing spots but you
can’t control them,” concluded Martin.
“I’m still trekking the waters, and I haven’t
decided on a final destination yet.”
Gaitskell
Continued from page 26
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