Ready, Set, Print! - Print+Promo

By Melissa Busch

Separate And Not Equal

Ian Buzon, office manager for San Diego, California-based eprintfast, said the difference between his company and a national franchise quick printer is quality. He explained that those quick printers are for public clients who are outside the print industry.

“[A] general client [who] walks into a Staples or Kinko’s is someone who does not normally print and needs a quick, small job done. Our company caters to individuals [who] know the exact particulars of what they want—for example, a client that does on-going print work or has regular print jobs,” said Buzon. “The printing we provide is of a higher quality. Generally quick, rough prints is something that you would print at a Staples or Kinko’s while sales material, menus, flyers, brochures and booklets are more along the line of things that we would cater to.”

Besides providing customers with high-quality printing, eprintfast keeps up with changing marketplace demands by remaining an active member of the print community. The company does this, in part, by constantly requesting feedback from trade printers. Buzon noted the biggest selling feature the company offers is that it is a 100 percent online shop. “This means that ordering, proofing and shipping is all done and tracked online. You can sit at your kitchen table on a Saturday morning enjoying your breakfast while ordering your next marketing campaign. Convenience and ease of use is something we take very seriously and constantly strive to improve. With our system the whole process takes minutes instead of days.”

What really makes eprintfast special is the little extras. eprintfast is not only a 24 hours a day, seven days a week operation but every job submitted gets reviewed and processed by a production coordinator, Buzon said. “People feel safer when they know that we proof everything that gets submitted. Nothing gets missed,” he added.

In another attempt to stay cutting edge, eprintfast changes equipment every five to seven years. Buzon remarked its oldest machine is fewer than five years old.

Though know one has a crystal ball, Buzon believes the futures points to direct mail.

“We think direct mail marketing is going to have a significant rise in demand in the near future,” he noted. “Demand is going to grow and run lengths are going to become shorter.”

The United States is in a financial crisis on par with the tumultuous economic times of the 1930s. And while it is impacting automakers, retailers, financial institutions and many segments of the print industry, some trade-only printers seem to be getting by unscathed.

“The economic recession has not affected our business negatively at all; in fact, it has helped us expand our network of print buyers to over 50,000 nationwide,” said Zarik Megerdichian, CEO at Glendale, California-based 4over, Inc. “We have opened three new production facilities, ranging from 42,000 to 50,000 sq. ft. each, [and] hired about 150 new employees all within the last few months. We are discovering more and more resellers are taking advantage of our services now, in order to grow their business.”

Brad Wallans, vice president of Trade Secret Printing in Toronto, Canada, piggy-backed on those comments. “The biggest challenge we have is managing the growth, which has been double digits for over seven years now,” he stated.

Riverside, California-based CCI & PartnerPrinting.com also is experiencing growth despite the rocky economy. “We are moving to a larger facility and we are adding equipment and staff and we are increasing our production capabilities,” noted Dean Lerch, vice president – marketing.

And because these companies work closely with national print franchises, their businesses continue to thrive.

Forget about the days of competing with quick print retail chains, Megerdichian said they work together. “We  do not compete with them since they sell direct to the end-users,” he proclaimed. “In fact, we complement their business by fulfilling their print needs. We provide print services to thousands of quick printers and print franchises.”

Lerch said PartnerPrinting.com was “one of the early pioneers of the online web-to-print wholesale ‘to-the-print-trade-only’ business models. We offered high-quality, full color offset printing; printed on multi-million dollar state-of-the-art sheet-fed offset presses, as an online wholesale resource exclusively for print resellers.” Lerch further explained that by printing in a gang-run format the company refined the process of putting multiple jobs on one large press sheet and calibrating its presses to ensure color consistency in gang-run environment. That’s important, he noted, because this color calibration process produces high-quality printing for a fraction of the cost of traditional stand-alone print runs.

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