Save file, print file, Ka-POOM-cha!
Tom Gardner isn’t resting on his laurels. In March, he received the 2006 Printer of the Year award from the National Association of Quick Printers. Last month, he and his brothers and business partners Joe and Peter officially opened a brand-new full-service plant in Westboro on Route 9.
Gardner says digital printing "has closed one door but opened three others." Entire printing skill sets have gone obsolete, to be replaced with other, more technical functions requiring computer literacy. And consumer-friendly graphic software has taken away a lot of the business card and letterhead business that used to be Curry’s bread and butter. As customers become more sophisticated, printers need to stay ahead of them. "We could still be doing what we did 20 years ago, but we wouldn’t be doing much of it," Gardner says.The Gardner brothers have operated Curry since 1981 when they took over an existing business that then did $190,000 in sales and had 1,200 square feet of space. They’ve grown it to a $5 million enterprise with 35 full-time equivalent employees, and 28,000 square feet and three locations (one of which is the Clark University print shop, which they’ve run for 7 years). And they’ve taken full advantage of the digital revolution to get there.
Today, Curry’s job portfolio includes customized training manuals that can be updated and ordered on an as-needed basis. It also provides large-size color posters and banners, and multi-part packages in which Curry’s printing services are bundled into packages that could include CDs, T-shirts and other non-print items. But Curry also still does job runs of one- and two-color postcards, rolling off an old AB Dick press that’s probably older than the freshman class at Clark University.
Short-run, high-quality color jobs can be individualized on press, enabling customers to slash their print inventory in a just-in-time, print-on-demand mode. Electronic transmission has allowed Curry to go global. For example, it has a print-on-demand customer in the United Kingdom, to whom it ships files for printing locally, eliminating the time and expense of trans-Atlantic shipping.
The digital revolution has broken other barriers of time and cost for short-run color work. It has eliminated the need for many expensive pre-press operations. Color photocopying has also improved to the point where it’s as good or better than what comes off a color press. So says Ann Rosseel, president of Marlboro-based Reservoir Printing. Her shop is smaller than Curry, with $1.8 million to $2 million in annual sales and 14 employees. "Even color copiers have gotten to be very high end [in quality]," she says. Reservoir’s equipment includes a high-speed Xerox docucolor 6060 that can be calibrated to pantone colors, which are custom mixes rather than the yellow-magenta-cyan-and black of process colors. Four-color copiers are good for runs of 500 or so, she says. Anything higher can be done on a direct-imaging digital printer.
"The entire industry is moving to shorter runs," says James Tepper, president of Printing Industry of New England. The use of variable data and versioned data, much like the zoned editions of a large-circulation newspaper, has changed buying habits and buying patterns, he says. In fact, he says, printers the size of Curry don’t only have to embrace print on demand in order to grow; they also need to take an active role in developing their customers’ marketing campaigns through service bundling and creating sales efforts personalized to individual customers. "What you need to do is to sell people a campaign," he says. "This is the kind of printing that’s going to start popping up, so you’ve got to be database-driven."
Christina P. O’Neill can be reached at coneill@wbjournal.com
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