中文Small markets are where the future of print gets tested first. With no room to hide, associations have to be clever, members have to collaborate, and leaders have to tell the truth about what’s hard. Few are doing that as openly as Jeroen Depraetere, managing director of FESPA Belgium, who took the role in 2025 and is already reshaping the country’s print landscape.
The headline move is a strategic alliance with Febelgra, the Belgian offset print association. The goal is a joint membership under shared conditions starting next year, so that where offset printers have long leaned on Febelgra for social, HR and legal support, FESPA members will soon get those exact same services. “Whether a member has an issue with HR, taxes or regulations, we will help directly or connect them with the right expert,” Depraetere said. For wide-format and sign companies that have never had that safety net, it’s a genuine upgrade.
It’s also a smart survival tactic. Running two separate associations in a compact market means duplicated overhead and fragmented clout. Merging the member services under one roof concentrates both — and gives printers one place to turn when labour law, tax or regulation gets messy. Given Belgium’s famously high European labour costs, that support isn’t a perk; it’s the difference between a tight margin and a red one.
On the networking front, FESPA Belgium is keeping it human. The focus right now is bringing people together through local meetups across Belgian provinces and at major international gatherings. During the FESPA Global Print Expo in Barcelona this year, they hosted a dedicated Belgian evening — a “Soirée Belge” — and they’re active at events like the Sign2Com trade show in Kortrijk. These aren’t glitzy galas; they’re the unglamorous venues where printers meet, swap ideas and speak openly about what’s working and what isn’t.
Where it gets genuinely forward-looking is talent and technology. Depraetere is blunt that finding young people to join the industry is hard — true across most sectors today — but FESPA Belgium is working directly with schools and educators to align curricula with the trade and get students acquainted with sign and print early. This year they even brought students and teachers to FESPA in Barcelona so they could see the scale of the international market firsthand. Plant the seed early, and you might just grow the next generation of operators and owners.
And then there’s the part every printer is wrestling with: AI. Depraetere talks about integrating AI across pre-press and workflows, and about capacity-sharing models to boost profitability. That’s the pragmatic European answer to high costs — don’t just buy a smarter machine, share it, and let software take the drudgery out of prepress. For a market this size, collaboration and automation aren’t buzzwords; they’re the profit plan.
The lesson for the rest of us? In tough markets, the associations that win are the ones that stop defending turf and start sharing it. Merge the services, bring the youngsters in, and treat AI as a tool on the bench rather than a threat at the door. Belgian print is small, but it’s sketching a playbook the big markets will be studying soon.
Source: FESPA
