Kenneth Adams

Elise Hacking Carr is senior production editor for Print & Promo Marketing magazine, and managing editor for PRINTING United Journal.

There’s a running joke about the forms business. It chooses you, not the other way around. So what’s a fated print supplier or distributor to do when, just to survive, he or she has two major opponents to battle: technology and the economy?

No longer the workhorse of the industry, continuous forms can still create strong sales Cut-sheets, single-parts, electronic forms… All have eaten away at continuous forms' previous dominance as the heavyweight workhorse of the forms world. Despite this evolution in customers' needs and desires, manufacturers maintain that continuous can still be a strong selling point for forms distributors. "Continuous has been declining over the past several years; it's down 50 percent from 10 years ago," said Kenneth Adams, president of Central States Business Forms, Dewey, Okla. "In just the past six months, it's down 5 percent or so. There's been a shift to smaller orders. The larger

Adding custom features to multi-part forms can maintain profitability. Conventional wisdom dictates abandoning a sinking ship. And, likewise, many would counsel a shift away from selling declining product lines, such as multi-part forms, in favor of growing opportunities in newer markets. A recent industry study pegged the decline of conventional forms—which includes continuous, checks, salesbooks, pegboard and short-run forms, as well as multi-parts—at approximately 7.5 percent from 2000 to 2002. During the same period, the total retail value of products such as labels, direct mail, tags, tickets, commercial and quick printing, finishing services and promotional products rose approximately 4.2 percent. It seems intuitive to

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