Man is Meant to Act and Not be Acted Upon

Originally published in Larry Hunt’s Wide Format News

Last month we began to define a practical checklist and roadmap for initially taking the plunge into the wide format business: defining your target market, deciding what type of machine corresponds to that target market, calculating the footprint necessary for the equipment and supplies, and discussing various options you’ll be presented with during the purchase process.  This month we’ll focus on finishing and ancillary services, obtaining employee training, and media options.

First, decide what finishing services you are going to offer – Laminating, mounting, trimming, scanning, stitching.  Most people argue that all of the above are a mandatory part of the game, but I will say loud and proud that I had paid off my machine before I even considered “expanding” into these worlds.  This is an important point, because you’ll need a large table in a big room to do any kind of finishing on these unwieldy prints.  A 100” rotary trimmer by definition needs at least a 100” table!  Unless you have unlimited space, minimizing your finishing menu is an invaluable exercise.  And trust me, the more you have to touch these prints, the more money you’ll lose because of fingerprints, wrinkles, and smearing.

Trimming: Trimming is the most important and most mandatory finishing service you will offer.  It can be the easiest or the most tedious, depending on your workflow.  Most printers will cut full-bleed on the short-side of your banner, and print to the edges on the long-side, so you don’t have to do any trimming if you know your printer.  Otherwise you will be literally unrolling a 40 foot banner on the sidewalk and taking to it with a utility knife and a yardstick, like I did at first.  Very quickly we just started telling everyone the banners had to be 24”, 36” or 42” high (corresponding to the roll-widths we stocked.)

Grommets are easy and mandatory.  A self-piercing grommet puncher will cost you under $200 and take little space.  Rather than measuring where the grommets go and distributing pencil marks, I’ll tell you the secret right now for easily knowing where to put the grommets: print out the banner on a normal piece of paper off your color copier, with the image shrunk to fit the page.  Then, just fold the page in thirds, quarters, fifths, etc. (depending on how many grommets you’re using), and place the grommets on your banner to correlate with the folds in your paper version.  No more measuring!  The top and bottom grommets will align themselves perfectly.  That tidbit just paid off a year of subscriptions to this newsletter.

Stitching is where you print extra fabric, fold it over, and sew it flat in the name of “reinforcing” the grommeted-sides.  It’s common on vinyl banners, but more and more shops are opting out, first and foremost because the process, no matter your workflow, is unwieldy.  You can try sewing banners, spray-gluing them, using a two-sided tape dispenser, but the honest answer is that unless you are buying cheap vinyl or really need combat-ready banners, stitching is just a flashy upsell.

Laminating: The added glare of lamination more than cancels out the benefit of slightly increased water-resistance.  Laminators are expensive, take training, and can smell.  Spray and brush-on laminates work with mixed results—but most have a steep learning curve.  For those reasons I never bought a laminator.  If the customers specifically requested lamination and couldn’t be dissuaded, we just sent the shop down the road.

Mounting has a steep learning curve and takes specialized equipment.  For now you’re best off just making a deal with the framing store down the road.  If you have ventilation you can spray-mount signs onto various tagboards in-house.  But foamcore and heat-mounting require expertise and space that shouldn’t be part of a “jumping in” article.

Scanning: Most wide format jobs will come in on disk.  Your printer, or your blueprint printer in the front room, may come with a sheetfed scanner.  Still, many jobs will need a flatbed or drum scanner.  Many local film houses tape prints to a wall and take pictures of them with a nice camera and adjustable lighting.

Get trained and train your employees. Training for yourself and every member of your staff should be part of the sales process—don’t let the salespeople tell you it’s something special or extra.  Be sure training happens after you have had some late nights alone to mess around with the machine and write questions.  And next time you hire someone, put “experience in wide format” as a preferred qualification.  Figure out who you’re going to call when you get stuck.  We found out after buying our printer that despite our expensive maintenance contract that neither our salesperson nor her technician had ever seen our model before.  I ended up just finding a number for the engineering department at Canon, who were frustrated when I called, but could answer my questions.

Media/Substrates:  We’ll get more into this next month, but rule of thumb, especially at this beginning stage: Always opt for the heavier media.  There is no real benefit to skimping on substrates, and the customers will notice and appreciate thick paper.  A 150 foot roll of 20# paper is literally $5 cheaper than 28# paper.  That’s mathematically $0.01 per square foot difference.  While you’ve experienced variations in color accuracy between coated and uncoated papers on a color copier, this may be the first time you’ve worked with the fickleness of extremely variant substrates.  Colors on vinyl will look dull unless you apply them like lipstick, while any but the lightest ink density on bond will warp the paper.  Until you know what you’re doing don’t try to save pennies buying cheap paper or lowering settings unnecessarily—err on the side of thick media, high ink density, high resolution, and slow printing.  On most jobs you can eventually lower the density, and the resolution won’t forever need to be above 250 dpi.

Define your pricing strategy.  Don’t make the mistake of basing your prices on your costs, or you’ll leave a lot of money on the table.  A few minutes of anonymous calls to your competition will get you comparables, mostly priced by the square foot.  We charged $5.50/sq. ft. for vinyl, $7/sq. ft. for photo paper, and $9/sq. ft. for canvas.  Prices went down with quantity, but not by much.  Don’t worry about computing ink coverage at this stage.

Find some high res photos for samples.  You probably have a subscription to a stock photo site, but to print something demonstrative at 300 dpi at 30”x40” you’ll need a 108 megapixel wedding photo!  You’re not going to find that.  Instead, find the nicest, highest-resolution photo you can, and see what happens.  Most image sites, including Google Images, allow you to search by resolution.  Flickr allows you to search not only by resolution, but by royalty license, so you can search for 10MP+ photos that are “free for commercial use.”  My favorite search term for samples is “HDR,” which means “high dynamic range” and will bring up some glorious photos.

For my first sample, I printed a family portrait on canvas and had it professionally framed.  Second, I donated a vertical 3-by-8 foot vinyl banner to a church camp in exchange for them letting me hang it up once camp was over.  Third, I found a 6MP press release screencap from WALL-E, printed it on 36”x72” photo paper and hung it on the wall with banner rails.  Now, 6MP/72” = 51 dpi!  After a lifetime of telling your employees not to accept anything under 300 dpi, you’ll now learn, and will need to teach your customers daily, how forgiving the human eye is when looking at large images.  (Your average movie screen is 3 dpi!)  Customers come in off the street daily to stare at that poster and to comment how high the resolution is, giving me a great icebreaker to teach them what we could do with their photos.

That’s more than you need to know to purchase a wide format printer and make a thousand dollars in the next 30 days.  As always, if you need help or clarification, feel free to call us.

Colin Jensen, MBA, loves your questions or comments and can be reached at colin colinjensen.com or 415-827-5630

Related articles

• The Top five Uses Of Vinyl Banners (tfollowers.com)
• on Getting Started in Wide Format Printing – Part II (colinjensen.com)
• Answering Reader Questions on Substrates for Printing (colinjensen.com)
• Trend Alert: Gorgeous Grommets (fabsugar.com)
• How the HP Designjet L Series Latex Printers can help you to go green (hpplotterrepair.co.uk)
• 2×4 Vinyl Banners for Sushi Bars (bannersandsigns.wordpress.com)

Tags: Business, Google Images, Grommet, Image resolution, Image scanner, Laminate, Printing, Vinyl banners