While the digital age was heralded as the death of printing, let's just say Mark Twain had it right. The report of its death was greatly exaggerated. To thrive, small commercial printers are investing in technology to offer clients a range of services from design and digital tracking to mailing. Small printers in NH say technology, along with personal services such as free delivery, is what keeps them competitive. The few dozen small printers in the state continue to be a one-stop shop for jobs of five copies to thousands.
Technology Scales
Frank Lagana has served as president of Papergraphics in Merrimack for 30 years. He has lived through the evolution of letterpress printing to digital technology. From its five-color and two-color Heidelberg offset presses to its newest HP Indigo 3550, Papergraphics can help a customer with five copies or 50,000.
In the past, if you wanted something technical, you had to go to the big guys, but now it's all even with digital. There's stuff we can do now that we just couldn't before, he says. Tough as the economy is, you still have to keep up with technology.
Papergraphics specializes in point-of-sale materials, direct mail, brochures, business cards, and presentation materials. The company is also able to print on a wider variety of stocks and with more variable data than in the past. It also does self-mailers, a cost-effective way to present product photos, graphs, charts and other images, that don't require envelopes to mail. Lagana says providing these options levels the playing field with the big guys.
The printing business is competitive, so Lagana says he is ready to find customers even in unexpected places. Recently, he overheard the owner of a home-based business talking with a mail clerk and he politely interrupted to answer the direct mail questions the clerk couldn't. Lagana left the post office with an unexpected client. The customer was a garbage collector and Lagana taught him the value of using Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM), which has been a boon to small businesses because of the economies of postage. It allows customers to identify a zip code and automatically send thousands of mailers without knowing addresses. He also helped him design a postcard by checking out his website and adding some valuable pieces of information that weren't listed, such as a local award the business won. We tend to do a little more and lend our marketing experience to help our customers, Lagana says.
Small commercial printers are also helping customers by offering one-stop shopping. Ted Jarvis, vice president of sales for Logo Loc/Print New Hampshire in Manchester, does this by offering a program tieing direct mail to the Internet. When you tie in a web-based campaign, all of the people who log on and do a survey are tracked and you see who responded to the mail piece, he says. You capture their information so you have immediate results and you are building a data base for the client.
Adding integrated services has contributed to a 15 percent boost in business for Logo Loc/Print New Hampshire in the past year along with investments in digital presses and personal delivery.
The Economics of Digital
Due to the small size and high variability of most printing jobs these days, few economies are achieved by having larger presses. Small commercial printers say this helps them compete with larger printers as they can buy or lease digital printing presses. Another reason small printers say they can thrive is that they offer personal care that the larger companies don't.
From concept to completion, Curtis Boles, owner of Colonial Printing in Manchester, has been providing printing services to area businesses for close to four decades and has seen the winds of change. A lot of people are now doing their own setup with layout and design on their own computers, where before we had a full-time typesetter and paste-up artist, so the front-end part of the business has slowed and changed our business, he says. Things that used to be produced with film and plates now go right to the digital printer.
Last year, Colonial leased a top-of-the-line digital color printer to meet the changing needs of its customer base, which includes a lot of area nonprofits, credit unions, banks and schools. The printer not only increases the speed of completing projects, but also varies the paper size he can handle. Changes to copy can be made in minutes as opposed to the hours it used to take. He also offers delivery in Manchester.
Boles is preparing for the eventual shift of the company's ownership to his son, Jeff, who has used social media to grow the business. The younger Boles started a Facebook page for the company and offers discounts and advice about printing. Colonial also now has a Google Plus page and a Yelp entry so customers can share their experiences. Although the business does not have concrete statistics about the impact of its social media efforts, Jeff Boles says they have received plenty of referrals and new customers this way.
Small printers also help clients with a more basic need: Storage. It's cheaper to produce more copies at once, but not all clients have a place to store them. That's why Michael Comeau, owner of Wharf Industries Printing Inc. in Concord and Windham, offers no-charge storage for clients who want the price break of a large order, but don't have room to store the finished product. Wharf has a large warehouse where it can store hundreds of thousands of copies for a customer if needed, and they will deliver it on demand. If they are downsizing their operation or square footage and they don't have the room they had in the past, this can be a big help, Comeau says.
Wharf recently added direct mail services, which help it compete with larger printers. This has really given us a nice edge where we can offer it in-house and take it from the beginning. From the design to print to direct mail and bringing [it] right to the post office so no one on the client side has to touch it, Comeau says.
Many small printers, like Lagana, offer both offset presses and digital presses (which apply ink in a single pass). After a certain quantity, it becomes less expensive and faster to print on an offset press instead of a digital press for full-color process printing, Lagana says.
Wharf Industries appeals to clients' desire to do good for themselves and the community. Wharf recently ran a promotion where it donated five percent of every order to a local charity in the name of the customer. And that is just one way that Comeau connects with customers. Customers often prefer a local printer due to the high degree of personal attention that most print jobs require, such as client approvals of proofs and press checks during actual printing. Price, therefore, becomes a secondary consideration to quality
and timeliness, he says.