swissQprint Brand Guidelines: The Rhine Valley Maker of UV Flatbed Printers Founded in 2007

Three founders, a UV flatbed and the Rhine Valley.

swissQprint is a young company by the standards of Swiss engineering. It was founded in September 2007 by Reto Eicher, Hansjörg Untersander and Roland Fetting, Large Format Review reported in a ten-year profile in 2017, and the company’s own history gives the same names and year, with Widnau, in the St. Gallen Rhine Valley, as the place where it started.

The beginning was modest. It was not a garage but “a corner of a large warehouse,” Large Format Review wrote, where five men set about developing a new UV flatbed printer. Eicher himself told the Australian trade magazine Print21 in 2012 that the company had started with four people and then employed 35. That 2012 feature, written after a visit to the Widnau plant, explained where the team came from: swissQprint grew out of a larger Swiss manufacturing company that had decided its young inkjet business was not a strategic fit, and in 2007 a handful of its employees, led by Eicher as chief executive, used their experience of wide-format UV printing to start a business of their own.

The money came from close to home. Print21 reported that a regional Swiss finance partner provided backing and was content with a minority shareholding, leaving the running of the company to its owner-managers. Ten years later Large Format Review described swissQprint as an independent joint-stock company whose three founders still played active roles. The company today calls itself “an independent, owner-managed Swiss company.”

Oryx, Impala, Nyala, Kudu and Karibu.

The company’s products are large flatbed printers that cure UV ink as they print, so that rigid boards and flexible sheets come off the bed ready to use. Its first model, the Oryx, had its premiere on the margins of the drupa trade fair in Düsseldorf in 2008, Large Format Review reported; Print21 noted that the original Oryx used Konica Minolta printheads. The Impala followed in 2010, and the extra-wide Nyala, with a bed 3.2 metres across, made its debut at drupa 2012. From the outset, Large Format Review wrote in 2017, the company built only UV flatbed printers of modular design, so that a base machine could be configured and extended to suit each customer.

New generations then came at intervals of a few years. A second generation began with the Nyala 2 in 2014, and the 500th machine was delivered in February 2015, according to Large Format Review. LED curing arrived with the Impala LED and Nyala LED, which had their premiere at the FESPA trade fair in 2017. The company’s own history lists a third generation in 2018 and, in 2019, the Karibu, its first dedicated roll-to-roll printer, 3.4 metres wide. A fourth generation followed in 2021 with neon inks that the company says are exclusive to swissQprint, then the Kudu in 2022, a flatbed with ten colour channels, and a fifth flatbed generation launched in January 2025.

The current range, as the company presents it, has five flatbed models — Kudu, Nyala 5, Topi 5, Impala 5 and Oryx 5 — and two roll-to-roll printers, the Karibu 2 and Karibu S. Its site shows wallpaper and murals printed on its machines, and the company lists a glass-printing option among its award winners. The company lists a run of trade awards, among them several European Digital Press (EDP) Awards between 2014 and 2025 and “Printer of the year” titles from the German magazine Druck & Medien for the Karibu in 2019, the fourth-generation flatbeds in 2021 and the Kudu in 2022.

How the category presents itself.

Wide-format printer and cutting-table makers sell machines that are easiest to understand in motion. Their brochures and stands show flatbed printers with a gantry of printheads passing over rigid boards, roll-to-roll machines feeding out lengths of printed vinyl and textile, and cutting tables whose heads trace shapes in corrugated board. The finished work — a shop-window graphic, a printed box, a length of fabric — usually carries the customer’s brand rather than the maker’s.

Many of these companies arrived from somewhere else. EFI began with the Fiery colour server, which turned office copiers into colour printers, and moved into inkjet when it bought VUTEk in 2005; Durst made photographic enlargers in Brixen for decades before turning to UV inkjet in the early 2000s, according to Wikipedia and the companies’ own histories. Their names, in other words, were built on one kind of machine and carried onto another.

Because the machines are large, makers invite buyers to see them running. EFI names customer experience centres in Londonderry, New Hampshire, in Castellón, Spain, and in Bergamo, Italy; Durst opened a customer experience centre of more than 5,700 square metres at its new Brixen headquarters in 2019, the German trade magazine Druckmarkt reported, saying it wanted customers to come there rather than rely only on trade fairs.

The fairs still set the calendar. The FESPA fair is where Durst added two P5 printers in 2019 and planned to show its Kyveris software in 2026, according to Druckmarkt and Large Format Review; at drupa 2016 in Düsseldorf, Druckmarkt noted, Koenig & Bauer and Xerox announced a digital folding-carton press. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Made in Kriessern, sold through partners.

Growth soon outran the first site. By the mid-2010s there was no floor space left in Widnau, Large Format Review reported, and in early 2015 the company moved into newly built premises in Kriessern; the company’s history says the new home gave it three times the production space. Sales abroad have run from the start through dealer partners, first in the German-speaking countries and then across Europe and overseas. A United States subsidiary followed — in October 2015 according to Large Format Review, in 2016 according to the company’s own timeline — then subsidiaries in Japan in March 2017 and Germany in April 2017. Those subsidiaries handle sales and service only; development and production stay at headquarters, Large Format Review wrote.

Today the company says it has about 220 employees, six subsidiaries and a distributor network covering 40 countries, with around 30 per cent of the headquarters staff working in research and development alongside the production team. It describes its printers as “100% made in Switzerland” and says all of them are manufactured at its Swiss headquarters; we give those as its claims. The company says it delivered its 2000th printer in 2024 and, in 2026, marked ten years in North America by moving into a newly built facility there. Like others in its field it meets customers at trade fairs and in showrooms, and its site lists FESPA Global Print Expo in Munich in April 2027 among its coming events.

For a design guide, swissQprint shows how a young industrial brand can build an identity on a single place and a family of model names. Compare Zünd, a cutting-system maker from the same Swiss Rhine Valley, and Mimaki, a Japanese maker of wide-format inkjets. For this guide we use slate, white and a neon pink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep swissQprint’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.