Don Watts

Don Watts is the principal of DW+Partners.  Jon Robinson interviewed him in March 2005.

Jon Robinson: In late 2003, your DW+Partners firm joined with St. Joseph Corporation. How has that turned out?

Don Watt: St. Joe is a strategic partner. They are sensational. One of the things that our relationship with St. Joe has done is give us access to their Pi Media group: a group of super super photographers, a group of super super technology people, great prepress. More and more of our clients, especially the large ones for whom we do many labels, in terms of the packaging side, want end-to-end solutions. So as part of a $400-million corporation, we can offer end-to-end solutions to the largest customers in the world. We are doing that. We acquired the Wal-Mart business in the U.S. back from Watt International toward the end of last year.

How do you leverage Pi Media for Wal-Mart?

DW: When we left Watt in June of 2003, the merchant bankers assisting us to form our new business said, “You know you really need a strategic partner, as well as a [mergers & acquisition] partner. We would like you to meet Tony Gagliano of St. Joseph. I said, “Who is St. Joseph.” So we met them and I thought, “Oh this is pretty nice.” And I love Tony... great guy. But then I went to see the Pi Media thing and all of a sudden I realized here are some of the great photographers I have worked with over the years, and fantastic prepress. But then I discovered that they had this Digital Asset Management workflow tool, called Blue Chip, which is blow away.

Why is Blue Chip so good?

DW: It enables real-time participation of ourselves, our client and the printer – whoever the supplier may be, wherever the supplier may be in the world – to link through an internet-driven website and everybody can see in real-time: press proofs and everything real-time. We can shorten the time of bringing a product to market by 30 per cent.

So not only is St. Joseph a good printer, and we actually have no contact with their printing division, but the Pi Media group are an integral part of our offering for prepress and digital workflow systems. One of our clients has over 100 retail clients and they are going on the Blue Chip system. This is true end-to-end in real-time.

There are a lot of different opinions about whether a printer should portray itself as a printing company or as a communications company. What is your opinion?

DW: If I am looking for a printer, I don’t really care much about communications. I am looking for what they can do.

How then can a printer avoid talking about machines, which does not necessarily work anymore in terms of getting in front of clients?

DW: It’s a funny situation. When I came up to Canada to work, my first job was with Rolph-Clark-Stone on Carlaw Avenue in Toronto. They had good equipment and a great reputation, and truly a deserved one. I learned [from them] about what you had to do on the press and all about colour separations.

This was in the 1960s and I really regard Rolph as being a major part of my learning experience. But they would say that they have a new Miehle, or this and a new that. My eyes would just glaze over when a printer told me about the equipment they have. What you really need is an idea of what it’s used for and how it makes your life easier with a better product.

What chance does print have as a new generation of media buyers take charge and have little or no affinity for print?

DW: Print will be around for a long time. People do not walk around with a computer the whole time. These ideas are evolving, but they evolve much slower than we thought. When the internet started and everyone went into e-commerce, most of them went in the tank because they didn’t realize that sales would not match the investment.

How were you involved with Wal-Mart’s arrival on the world?

DW: Wal-Mart happened to arrive at a business model that allowed it to put goods on the floor, at prices about 15 per cent below their key competitor K-Mart and 20 per cent below Target and still make money. When they put food in, they tripled the customer traffic. What we did was create a new 130,000-square-foot Wal-Mart store and tacked on a 60,000-foot food store and took out the wall in between, so you can go from place to place.

Building the hypermarket [before working on Wal-Mart] helped us. It is the reason that Sam Walton [founder of Wal-Mart] hired us to build the new Wal-Mart. Then we re-branded the business. At the time they had several old-fashioned brands. We proposed a simple brand mark with a star in it. They didn’t buy the star at first, but when Sam passed away in 1992, they resurrected the star in his memory. I’m not sure that they use the star in Canada or not. But all the U.S. stores have them in memory of Sam.

What do you make of Wal-Mart’s big-play strategy in RFID and is it only about managing the supply chain?

DW: No. What it does is provide truly superior information about customers and product movement. When IBM developed the universal UPC code in 1972 or something, retailers were slow to accept it, but what it did was put information into the hands of the retailer first.

They didn’t have to wait for the Neilsen ratings. They now had their own IRI or Neilsen. In fact, Neilsen came to them and asked for information.

The marketplace is now full of Hi Definition, from plasma TVs and 2-inch cell phone displays to monitors and projectors. What does this say about the need for very high-quality print?

DW: If you look at newspapers today, they are getting better. Newspapers are printed offset, with the exception of some. They are printing better 4-colour pictures. The papers of today and tomorrow have to be offset driven with better colour. The consumer expects and demands better colour and better pictures. Magazines today have Hi Definition, they have beautiful reproduction compared with magazines in the past.

What do you consider to be some of your greatest branding projects?

DW: Well, we created Home Depot in Atlanta, because the principals were interested in a new kind of home centre. We didn’t create the concept of a big home centre, they already had that. What we did was create the brand and the prototype stores for them in the Atlanta market. So that has become one of the big ones. Wal-Mart has become even bigger, and Loblaws was technically bankrupt when we started with it.

Retail, by and large, is procurement driven so Dave Nichols realized he had to turn his [Loblaws] organization into a combination of procurement and marketing. So he created a dual-function corporation. To develop and market products and to run the stores. That was his secret. And you know there is not a retailer in the United States, maybe except Wegmans, who really understands that. Thirty years later, what Nichols did is still not understood.