中文Paper merchants aren’t famous for swagger. It’s a trade built on spec sheets, availability and quiet reliability – the kind of business where the sales pitch is usually a well-organized swatch box and a firm handshake. Which is exactly why the latest move from Toronto-based Huge Paper is so refreshing: the independent merchant has expanded its NX Gloss coated sheet with a raft of new formats and weights, and backed it with a challenge that amounts to trash talk by paper standards.
“Press test it against any gloss house sheet. We’ll supply the paper and the coffee, no questions asked,” said Jeff Tapping, President of Huge Paper.
Read that twice. A paper supplier is so confident in its house-brand gloss sheet that it’s offering to run it head-to-head against whatever premium stock a printer already uses – on the printer’s own press, with the supplier picking up the materials. In a market where coated paper is often treated as a commodity and purchasing decisions are made on price per thousand sheets, that’s a genuine product-confidence flex.
The expansion itself is aimed squarely at where print volumes actually live. Since NX Gloss launched in 2025, feedback has been strong enough that Huge Paper is adding new digital sheets, folio sizes and weights to the range. The most interesting addition is the new NX Gloss 90lb Text, positioned as a smarter middle option: trade up from 80lb Text for a more substantial feel at a lower cost, or trade down from 100lb Text while keeping a premium result. It’s the classic value-engineering play, executed at the sheet level – giving printers a way to improve the in-hand quality of a job or claw back margin, depending on which direction their business pressure is coming from this quarter.
That flexibility matters more than it sounds. Print buyers in 2026 are squeezed from both ends: brands want packaging and collateral that feels premium, while budgets keep getting trimmed. A 90lb gloss text that prints like a 100lb at an 80lb-adjacent price is exactly the kind of option that wins a re-quote. And for the growing share of work running through digital presses, dedicated digital sheets in the right sizes mean fewer jams, better toner or inkjet adhesion, and less waste on short runs.
Huge Paper’s positioning as an independent merchant is part of the story too. Independent merchants live or die on agility – they can source, spec and price in ways the giant paper companies can’t, and they’ve become the go-to channel for printers who need something specific, fast, without minimum-quantity theater. A merchant house sheet like NX Gloss, expanded aggressively based on customer feedback in its first year, is the playbook working as designed.
The wider context is a coated paper market that has spent years bouncing through price volatility, mill closures and supply whiplash. In that environment, a stable, performance-verified house sheet at a competitive price isn’t just convenient – it’s a hedging tool for printers trying to quote jobs with any confidence.
So, is NX Gloss actually as good as Tapping claims? That’s the beauty of the challenge: Huge Paper isn’t asking anyone to take its word for it. The offer stands – samples and press test kits via HugePaper.com/samples, by phone at 1-844-261-4843, or through the order desk. Bring your current house sheet, run them side by side, and let the press be the judge. Worst case, you drink the coffee.
For printers tired of paying premium-brand prices for commodity work – or tired of value sheets that disappoint on press – a merchant willing to bet its own paper and its own coffee on the comparison is worth ten minutes of anyone’s time.
For the uninitiated, here’s why a press test beats a swatch every time. Paper behaves differently on press than in hand: sheet feeding, ink holdout, drying, marking on the back, dot gain – the only honest test is running the actual job on the actual press. A merchant confident enough to put its sheet into a customer’s press against the incumbent house stock is eliminating every excuse between curiosity and conversion. It also tells you something about margins in the merchant channel right now: nobody offers free press tests and free coffee on a product they expect to lose. Confidence at that level usually means the price-performance math strongly favors the challenger.
Source: PrintCAN – “Huge Paper Expands NX Gloss” (October 21, 2026). Image: Huge Paper.
It’s also worth noting what the NX Gloss expansion signals about the fine paper market more broadly. Merchants expanding house sheets in the middle of a soft demand cycle are usually reading the same tea leaves Huge Paper is: printers want to differentiate without paying premium-mill prices, and the value tier is where volume has migrated. A broader weight and size range, backed by an aggressive press-test offer, positions the sheet to catch that volume wherever it lands – digital, offset, or somewhere in between.
