Trade journalists, customers, industry partners, and experts in AI, automation, digital transformation, consumer behavior, and omnichannel retail are invited to St Gallen to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Gallus. The site, which at one time contained five or six adjacent buildings, has been sold, and the manufacturing and assembly of the new Gallus presses shifted to the various sites of the group, including Herisau, Langgöns, Weiden, and Wiesloch.
However, several of the main buildings have been rented back by the Gallus Group for its head office, and the production halls artfully transformed into the new Experience Center. The former factory becomes an expanded and modern demonstration center, think-tank, and laboratory. It becomes the place for the label and packaging industry to experiment and research, resolve customer challenges, and try new materials and technology – and in the words of Gallus Group CEO Dario Urbinati, “Even to fail.”
The Experience Center attempts in its architecture and design to anticipate the workplace of the future – one that will inspire and collaboratively develop and test the innovations of converters, suppliers, and industry partners. There are hybrid and malleable spaces hospitable both to visitors and Gallus resources seeking to resolve customer production and tech challenges and to imagine the innovations that will create the production ecosystems of the future. It occupies three floors of the main and the adjoining buildings with its expanded and dramatic double-height demonstration center.
Evolution and modernity
It is an idea and space that are emerging and becoming – flexible open spaces and purposeful fixed spaces for design and engineering, serious thinking, and education. And a museum-like time tunnel with a collection of industrial artifacts and chronologically curated information on the walls speak of legacy, evolution, and modernity. One versatile space is called the library, evoking the world heritage library of the Abbey of St Gallen. The double-height demonstration center is fully a high-technology display space designed for glitzy sound, light and visuals to highlight the technology and machines on show.
The building themselves are a shell or framework – ready to be reconfigured and rewired for the latest equipment, workflow, technology, mission, and purpose. To transform and change a known place is to show those who have inhabited or visited it, the possibilities and the necessities of the future.
The experience of the Gallus company over the past 100 years has been one of agility. Of recognizing the newest demands of industry and providing equipment that combines several operations or technologies to produce a finished product in one pass – such as the latest hybrid digital and flexo press.
The factory comprising adjoining buildings on several levels has generally changed its functional layout on each of our past visits. Just before the pandemic, Ferdinand Reuesch walked us through a couple of long narrow rooms containing a few of the company’s pioneering devices and machines with photographs on the walls.
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As Reuesch again walks and talks us through the comprehensively expanded and curated time tunnel he emphasizes the company’s tradition of mechanization – performing all tasks in one pass, and its agility in keeping up with the latest technology. He mentions the disruptive influence of modern computers – his father building a machine to produce IBM 80-column punchcards and buying a Hewlett Packard computer and the latest software to automate the company’s information systems.
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Several large projection screens are mounted high on the walls behind the presses in the ground floor demo area surrounding a technical core that drives the dazzling lights, video, and audio glamorizing the technology for the unveiling of new solutions in the digital transformation. It already includes the new hybrid Gallus One digital press with inline converting, the Gallus LabelFire digital label press, finishing machines from Prati and Steinemann, and flexo imagers and processors from Esko and Ashahi.
An interesting legacy feature of the new plant is that there is still a production area with deeply skilled professionals who will continue to refurbish Gallus presses in the company’s version of recycling – extending the lives of specified machines by another ten years. Also, there is the option of refitting the ECS 340 presses into hybrid Labelfire 340 digital presses – giving them a future-relevant and modern life – a technological reincarnation.
