Think smart. Work smart. Print smart.

Finding ‘smarter’ ways to work is an ongoing quest for anyone in business. Generating revenue is hard enough, so anything that can help you bring down your costs has to be worth taking seriously. With sales and marketing budgets under pressure for many businesses, adopting a smart approach to print buying makes sound sense. 

So what does printing smart actually mean? We are not going to pretend that its rocket science, it’s really just common sense, a case of you and your printer working closely together with one another to make sure the route you take is the best one. Sharing information is vital. Whether the job you are requesting a price for is part of a campaign, a regular project, or a one-off, let your printer know how your brief fits into the ‘bigger picture’ and if there’s a smart way of doing it, they should tell you.

Your printer should be a partner as well as a supplier. Here at Holywell, we understand the challenges our clients face, and we work with them to help them print smart whenever we can. We’ll always consider a print job from every angle to make sure we are recommending the most cost-effective solution. Here are a few recent examples that demonstrate how we can apply print smart thinking to save money for our clients:

• A number of our clients use business cards which feature different full colour images on the reverse. To print these cards in short runs each time a new employee joins the business is expensive. Instead, we print sheets of the cards, coloured side only, and hold these ‘stock blanks’ at our premises. The client can call these off whenever they need to; we simply overprint the personalised side in one or two colours, an inexpensive process. This way each new member of staff gets their cards, complete with images on the reverse for a fraction of the cost of printing afresh each time.

• Applying the same principle, we can print different covers for booklets. One of our clients is a private school, and each term, pupils are given an academic planner.  While the content of the planners is 2 colours, the covers are full colour, and different for each term. By printing the full colour covers together, at the start of the school year, holding them in stock until we print the planner content at the beginning of each new term, we’re able to provide the diaries at a price substantially less expensive than the school’s previous printer.
• When a client asked us to print a 12 page A4 brochure and told us it was going to be used for marketing in the USA, we suggested that producing the brochure in US A4 format rather than European A4 would not only make it more suited to the market, it would also make it cheaper. Because US A4 is smaller than UK A4, we were able to get more pages up on our printing press. Fewer plates and less make-ready time meant we were able to pass on substantial savings.

So, next time you have a print brief, don’t just give your printer the basic specifications, share as much as you can with them and tell them you want to print smart!

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