Man is Meant to Act and Not be Acted Upon

Originally published in Larry Hunt’s Wide Format News

Our reader writes: ‘One question I have is about giclee printing. I own an Epson 7800 24” wide-format printer. We do some wide format work on it, as well as proofing. I wonder about the feasibility of printing canvas and wrapping it around wooden frames. Should I just purchase canvas wrapped frames from a craft store and wrap my canvas around them (or is there a source for frames without canvas)? I would see us promoting this primarily to photographers and artists.’

The Epson 7800 will run canvas and, with eight colors, can probably do a pretty good job on it. Actually the canvas is probably easier to print than whatever you’ve been printing on so far on that machine. As you may have read in my columns, printing on canvas is just printing on a sponge, so sometimes I’ve upsold it spontaneously when the artwork submitted doesn’t have a high enough resolution for any other option.

As for wooden frames, it’s somewhat of a specialized skill (if only because it’s so easy to scratch an aqueous canvas print in the process) and requires inventory. So play with the idea, but in the meantime, run every real order over to a framing shop or perhaps hire an ex-frame shop employee to teach you how to do this type of work. I don’t have any sources for wooden frames for you.

As I mentioned in my recent article, there’s a frame shop close by, so it was just never worth it to even try doing it ourselves when with a little negotiation we could have a pro do it for close to the same price. Our framer said that professional photographers aren’t big fans of wrapping photos on wooden frames (except as a precursor to framing). It’s obviously very popular with some customers.

Your audience really depends on your current customer base. Being in a shopping center in an upscale area, we had tons of artsy walk-in traffic. We did a lot of paintings at first, and a lot of low-res photos.

Professional photographers and artists are a good market, but you’ll have to have the machine mastered before you get an in with them. You’ll have to do quite a few demos to get your colors balanced correctly, and know that 8-inks are mid-range and you won’t be able to compete on color depth with the 12-ink printers. (Most of these printers come in 4/5-, 8-, and 12-ink varieties aimed at engineers, print shops, and galleries, respectively.)

So for our canvas prints, we started with our own family photos, then demos for people in our shopping-center location (often with our logo somewhere for cross-promotion), then loyal customers (similarly cross-promotional), then to the general public. We just wanted room to make mistakes at first.

We ended up making our real money on that machine from event coordinators, who were both very high-volume customers and usually shipped the completed work straight to the venue. They will invariably ask for larger banners than you can provide on a 24-inch printer, but you can outsource them until you can buy a larger printer (then work your way up).

“How do you differentiate from Walmart, Walgreens and Internet printers? What about marketing to end users (brides, new babies, retirees, etc)?”

First off, don’t worry too much about the big box stores and Internet printers. People will perceive a difference in quality that, whether it is deserved or not, will allow you to charge more than Walmart. Walmart employees are unlikely to have the level of expertise that your employees have. My employees were generally obsessively visual people who were willing to sacrifice to work in a visual world. They were such natural perfectionists that I saw my job as manager as lowering their standards. If you’re aiming at a market of professional photographers, you don’t really need to factor in big-box stores.

Similarly, not many people are going to compare you to Internet printers. And when they do, your response is mostly sales technique, meaning recognizing that their decisions will be made on emotion and not numbers. You know that those guys on the Internet may have better machines than you, and they are sometimes run by skilled workers. But it is not easy for your customer to be convinced of this.

For the longest while I had a hard time when it came to brides asking about ordering wedding invitations online, because I knew that some of those low-price websites are front ends for the same exact factories I use. But it was rare to see a customer actually order successfully from an Internet site. While you, with your background, know enough to order invitations and other items online, your customers usually don’t. This is evidenced by the fact that you’ve rarely seen a customer actually pull it off successfully.

So the main advantage you have over an Internet printer is that neither you nor your customer has any way of gauging quality. At $8.00 or $9.00 per square foot, they’ll spend a few hundred dollars before they can safely “trust” or “distrust” an Internet printer. The Internet printer may be using thinner vinyl that wrinkles, or canvas with a looser and more visible weave. But the customers won’t know that until they’ve blown a substantial sum of money on their gamble.

And that’s not to mention problems getting suitable files to an Internet printer. Again, you know that emailing a five-MB JPG file is good enough for a canvas print, but many of your customers will insist on sending a 500-MB 600-dpi TIFF at full resolution, and may fear Internet printers on those grounds.

“Now I have a question about Tyvek. I recently printed some Tyvek event wristbands that worked pretty well. I purchased cut sheets and printed them with black ink only. The print quality wasn’t very good – but sufficient for this use. It was VERY labor-intensive to apply the double-sided tape. I found it interesting on your idea of Tyvek house wraps… I’m not sure a builder would be interested in 24” wide roll.”

Tyvek works best on a latex printer, and that’s a completely different subject. If you can work it out, it may be an interesting market for you. You might do just as well trying to run it through a copier or laser printer, especially if you can control the heat on your fuser so the toner doesn’t flake off.

Home wraps would be impossible with a 24-inch printer, especially using a printer whose prints aren’t necessarily waterproof. But contractors often have signs out front that say “Another lovely home by M&M Construction.” If you printed each of those signs on vinyl, that could bring in $5.00 or $6.00 per square foot plus grommets, which may become a high-volume product for you.

Related articles

• Popular Stretching techniques for Canvas Art prints (prfire.co.uk)
• Little Printer Debuts at CES (shoppingblog.com)
• on Getting Started in Wide Format Printing – Part II (colinjensen.com)

Tags: Big-box store, Canvas print, JPEG, Laser printer, Tyvek, Wal-Mart, Walmart, Wide-format printer