Diadeis will be announcing the acquisition of Graphic Systems Group (GSG), an independent American graphic production agency. For more than 30 years, GSG has been the partner of choice for many of the world’s leading brands, including L’Oréal, Novartis, Abercrombie &Fitch,Avon, andNBC. The company is entrusted with a wide range of missioncritical campaigns from special promotions to full-scale production consolidation. Founded in 1980 as a photographic retouching and fine art graphics specialist, GSG is now New York’s pre-eminent independent creative production agency, offering multilingual packaging mechanicals, premedia, digital, visual merchandising and software implementation.
Diadeis is well established throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This increased presence in North America helps the company cement its position as one of the leading international players in the design and premedia industry. This purchase places Diadeis amongstthe topthreeglobalplayers in the industry by strengthening its ability to meet the needs of the leading brand owners across all their markets.
“The UnitedStates is the leadingmarket in consumer packaging,” explains Jean-Charles Morisseau, Diadeis’s president. “This must be taken into account if you want to earn international recognition. In order to get established in this market, you must be able to offer a comprehensive service and have the means to take on substantial projects.
By incorporating GSG’s teams we can henceforth meet all of a brand’s needs in America.”
This acquisition marks Diadeis’s second big purchase of this year, with the company already having bought Alia, the main premedia packaging agency in India in May. With 150 employees located in India, South Africa, Singapore and Dubai and significant key accounts
such as Unilever, Mondelez, Kellogg’s, GSK, and more, Alia was the main premedia packaging agency in India. “It has also seen strong organic growth in Europe due to, amongst others, the success of decoupling, aprocess which has been implemented by top multinational companies such as Nestlé, Unilever, Mondelez and LVMH. This technique for
optimizing market processes involves separating in advance the communication media creation phase from the premedia stages such as adaptation, multilingual artwork and reprographics.
“By using a single agency like Diadeis, brand image can be unified across all communication media andall overthe globe, providing the client with quicker time-to-market and cost reduction, explains Sethunath Padmanabhan, Diadeis Alia’s managing director. “Diadeis’s strength has been its ability to pre-empt leading brand owners’
needs when they had to go from local management to launching products abroad,” says Jean-Charles Morisseau. “We offered tailor-made solutions in terms of both processes and tools to manage their ever more complex marketing projects. It has not just been our technical skills thathavebeenthe key to our success,but also our ability toguide our clients through this change and develop IT tools for graphic chain management.”
“With this merger, our clients will now be able to benefit worldwide from our full package of services,” explains Jan Stollerman, GSG’s managing partner. “Being able to globally manage a campaign efficiently and simultaneously has become a crucial factor in the industry, and we are proud to be able to now offerthis option.” Diadeis employs more than 600 people around the world, and is planning to strengthen its global footprint by opening several additional subsidiaries across theworldinthenext few years.
