On our twentieth birthday, we look back at the key milestones in Kallik’s history, a company always pushing the digital boundaries on its path from spin-off to recognition as a market leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant
Since joining Kallik in 2019, I’ve had the privilege of leading an ambitious, forward-looking team that continues to innovate and advance the conversation on how digital solutions can reshape the way companies in highly regulated industries do business. Kallik today has a truly international customer base with over 3,500 users, all benefiting from unrivalled agility, transparency and process efficiency.
Amid all of the global disruption experienced over the past two years, Kallik has gone from strength to strength as a business, accelerating global implementations of our flagship Veraciti™ solution and pushing ahead with our transformative product development pathway that meets the compliance needs of industries in an increasingly regulated world.
So where did it all begin? Our roots lie 20 years ago in digital asset management – a buzzword in the industry now but not when Kallik set out on its journey. We’ve come a long way since those pioneering days to firmly establish ourselves as a leading player in the global label and artwork management market.
Join us on our journey, values and key milestones to date:
Asset designers turned asset managers
Kallik was founded in 2001 by Neil Gleghorn, as a spin-off from an established digital origination company, The Box Room. Our target was to address the business challenge of cumbersome manual processes for building labels and artworks, with marketers, designers and product teams all involved as key stakeholders.
The team looked to develop a digital solution entirely in-house. The first iteration of Kallik’s artwork management software was designed to handle approval, workflow and asset management, based on pain-points and requirements laid out by a key international customer operating in regulated industries.
The solution immediately showed business benefits, providing a significant reduction in the volume of manually handled assets, cutting cost and complexity while enhancing management capabilities for all stakeholders.
Kallik soon became aware that a single centralised solution, further enhanced with digital capabilities, could fundamentally change the way businesses handle label and artwork management.
Addressing a critical capability gap with pioneering technology
One of the biggest label and artwork management challenges experienced by companies is the level of disconnect between teams, data and operations. Packaging such as leaflets and cartons, for example, is often managed separately to labeling, which can create a disjointed review, version control and management process. Move to the end of the value chain, and the factory print process is even more disconnected and heavily reliant on manual operations.
Enter Kallik.
Our Veraciti platform is unique. Within a single solution, Kallik can manage labels and packaging, extending all the way through to the factory print process. As the solution developed, we were committed to enhancing the capabilities of the original platform, to the point that now Kallik leads the way in leveraging automation and rules-based decision-making to cut manual processes and the risk of human errors being introduced.
Our solution Veraciti has emerged as a field leading, tried-and-tested platform for ensuring compliance in highly regulated industries from chemicals through to cosmetics, satisfying industry legislation to safeguard reputations, consumer confidence and the bottom line.
A customer-focused ethos
The customer has always been key in our development. Our collaborative approach to implementation – working closely with customers throughout the process, from data discovery and migration through to system integration – is a key pillar of maintaining our high levels of customer satisfaction, routinely referenced by our customers in industry reviews.
In the highly sensitive and regulated markets we work in, this level of collaboration and partnership has been instrumental to our significant successes in for example the medical device market, helping global manufacturers beat tight deadlines to comply with landmark industry regulations such as EU MDR and IVDR.
Accelerating growth with ambitious investment partners
The acquisition by FPE Capital in 2019 has provided the power to further accelerate our growth trajectory. Working with FPE Capital has allowed the company to significantly scale up operations and solution development, recruit technical, customer service and leadership talent and expand rapidly into new geographies and industries.
This ambitious growth strategy and intensified focus on technology innovation and customer service has reaped early dividends, with the Kallik customer base growing 35% since acquisition and a significant double-digit growth in revenue, as businesses worldwide realise the benefits of digitising their operations.
Today, Kallik boasts a global engineering and service capability and experienced senior leadership team, driving the global expansion of the tried-and-tested Veraciti solution to new heights.
Ahead of the game with cloud – from a luxury to ‘must have’ foundation
Cloud has always been at the heart of our founder’s vision for Veraciti and Kallik services – providing ease of accessibility, high service availability and rigorous data security.
Kallik has been significantly ahead of the curve in delivering solutions via the cloud – originally offering a private cloud solution at a time when this was unheard of, before migrating to an established cloud host.
Our cloud-based offerings have been further strengthened by our full migration to AWS in 2020, becoming the first solution provider in the market to do so. This AWS shift means we can today offer our entire global customer base the gold standard of secure, compliant and highly available cloud services.
Roadmap to the future – pushing the boundaries with AI and ML
Looking beyond cloud, Kallik has always led the charge for adopting disruptive and emerging technologies to transform label and artwork management operations. Veraciti was one of the first solutions in the market to provide a truly end-to-end solution, using automation to ease the burden of slow, repetitive manual processes that consumed disproportionate amounts of resources and capacity.
Our roadmap for the future incorporates advanced technologies such as AI and Machine Learning, combined with an extension of our existing automation capabilities – adding further value to customer operations beyond the sustained cost savings, agility and compliance enjoyed today.
We have a firm development pathway to further establish Veraciti as a turnkey solution capable of supporting global businesses in industries spanning food & beverage, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and beyond.
What lies ahead?
With Gartner industry recognition for enterprise labeling, e-labeling and artwork management also landing in our twentieth birthday year, the future is bright for Kallik as we continue to help businesses reach digital maturity in label and artwork management. We’ve come a long way from our roots – but the best is still to come.
Want to learn more about how we’re helping leading companies transform and future-proof their global label and artwork management? Download our complimentary ‘Digital Maturity Curve’ white paper, or find out more about the capabilities of our flagship Veraciti solution.
