Digital Etikett is an unlikely place to find a thriving print business. The company operates in Gaupne, a Norwegian village of about 1,200 people surrounded by mountains and fjords, with the next label company roughly six hours away. Yet COO Øyvin Tørvi doesn’t see geography as the defining factor in building a successful operation. Digital Etikett has no customers in its hometown, he says, and that’s beside the point: If you can make great products and reliably get them where they need to go, location becomes much less important.
What matters more, Øyvin says, is people.
That philosophy shows up in an unusual Digital Etikett practice: Every new employee starts in the shipping department, regardless of the job they were hired to do. Øyvin sees the box arriving at a customer’s door as an important moment in the relationship, so employees learn from the beginning what the company produces, how it should be presented, and the standard expected before anything leaves the building. “You should know the product going out the door, and you should take pride in making that box that goes out the door,” he says. “It should be perfect, because that’s the first thing the customer sees.”
Digital Etikett produces creative, visually impressive work, but Øyvin is quick to distinguish creativity from the fundamental responsibility of manufacturing. “We’re hired to reproduce and make the same thing 1,000 times, 10,000 times, 100,000 times,” he says. “It should be the same.” For print businesses facing pressure to handle more jobs, shorter runs, greater variety, and tighter turnaround expectations, that ability to consistently turn creative ideas into repeatable production is enormously valuable.
The team at Digital Etikett doesn’t separate operational performance from culture. The company's distinctive wood factory, filled with glass and views of the surrounding landscape, was intentionally designed as somewhere employees would enjoy spending their days. The same thinking influences hiring. Øyvin says skills are no longer necessarily the deciding factor in an interview because people who are willing to learn can be taught. Instead, he asks himself a more human question about a candidate: “Do I want to go out and play with you?” In other words, will this person fit naturally into a team that works hard, enjoys being together, and plans to stick around?
That combination helps explain how Digital Etikett succeeds from a place that might appear, on paper, to be a disadvantage. Its remote location can limit the hiring pool, but it also contributes to a stable team of what Øyvin affectionately calls “lifers.” Its production discipline creates consistency, while its culture gives people a reason to care about achieving it.
At Digital Etikett, operational excellence ultimately comes down to something surprisingly simple — creating a place where good people want to stay, setting a high standard, and making sure what reaches the customer lives up to it.
