Images_Digital_Edition_June_2019

www.images-magazine.com 42 images JUNE 2019 BRAND PROFILE were being printed and manufactured.” George’s father helped many small businesses grow by not only selling them the equipment and inks they needed, but also by teaching them how to print. From a young age George learned the business as well, helping to fill ink bottles and visiting screen printing customers with his father during his school holidays – it was, he says, always his intention to work in his father’s business. By the late 1990s, the screen printing market in Greece had collapsed by 90%, George reports, as jobs were sent instead to Eastern European and Asian countries. “Many of the printing houses T he company Polyprint was created in 2003, but its roots go back more than four decades to 1976 when Nikos Benglopoulos set up a business selling screen printing machinery and consumables. In the 80s and the early 90s, Thessaloniki in northern Greece, where Polyprint is based, was one of the biggest textile printing areas in Europe. “There were thousands of companies here producing garments for famous brands like H&M, Adidas, Nike, etc, and many fashion brands as well,” reminisces George Benglopoulos, Nikos’s son and the company’s CEO. “It was exciting to visit customers and see how the clothes Polyprint has been in the direct-to-garment printing market right from the beginning and brings all this experience to designing, developing and building its DTG printers at its headquarters in Greece. George Benglopoulos reveals to Images how the company continues to punch above its weight To infinity and beyond and garment factory facilities closed here – digital technology was the only way to survive as it allowed them to produce small quantities and provide fast deliveries to European customers.” The company was quick to adapt and sold one of the first Manoukian (now Kiian) roll-to-roll dye sublimation printers, in 1998. George, now studying chemistry at the university in Thessaloniki, helped install it. “I was a student but I was still working part- time as a technician and helping with installations.” It was inevitable that out of the 15 topics available to him for his thesis in 2000, he would opt for digital textile printing at the Textile Polyprint’s CEO George Benglopoulos and the new ‘infinity’ logo