Digital BW, The Print

Your question is a good one and yes, there have been consistant
good-sellers during the run of my business and indeed, if I had to cut
back to 20 cards I could do it rather easily except customers expect and
demand variety...even if they don't pick it. I never volume printed the
popular ones mostly because it never crossed my mind to do it that way.
An EXCELLENT suggestion for anyone considering getting into this though!

When I did consider having the cards run on a press I did some serious
quality control and found they could just darn near match my own output.
Shoot, now I wish I'd of gone ahead and let them do those
best-sellers...it would have saved me some time!

Lea

----- Original Message -----
From: "houstonspencer" <houston.spencer@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2004 7:33 AM
Subject: [Digital BW] Re: direction about greeting cards


Hey, Lea...

Great to hear from you.  I knew you'd be a font of wisdom.

Curious about something, given our different approaches.  I can
understand why you would inkjet print new images that are un-proven
in the marketplace, and images that don't move very fast.  Do you,
however, have a number of images that are best sellers?  Or doesn't
the old maxim hold for you, ie that a majority of sales comes from a
small portion of your catalog?

If you sell relatively even quantities across your range, I see how
inkjet printing on demand would lower your inventory and cashflow
issues.  But if you sell some images consistently in large
quantities, while the rest of your catalog moves more slowly,
wouldn't you gain a lot of margin on your highest volume products by
doing moderately large press runs of the popular sellers?  ...using,
of course, same stock and quality controlling with your original
inkjet print as the match-to proof?  I guess, if you're using CIS,
your ink costs approach zero per card, so maybe my margin
calculations are off.

The difference in our approach is easy to understand given the number
of images you're managing.  I was never making the bulk of my income
this way, so I only ever stocked 20-30 images.  For that small number
of products, the up-front printing costs were low and inventory was
uncomplicated.  You've got a much, much more sophisticated business.
And much more successful!  Good on you.

--h



--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "lea" <lea@w...>
wrote:
> I made it!
>
> The original post got past me somehow but I would be happy to share
a
> bit of what I've learned in my 7+ years of running my own greeting
card
> company full-time (my only source of income I'm proud to say).
>
> Let me preface by saying that every card I've printed in all the
years
> I've been doing this have been printed on an Epson
printer...starting
> with the Epson Stylus, then the Epson 800, 850 and currently I'm on
my
> 4th Epson 900. For me, buying new printers and ink was much cheaper
than
> having the cards printed by a shop. For a couple of reasons...my
full
> card line has over 300 images in it and there is no way I could
afford
> to have enough quantity of that many images printed in bulk. The
other
> reason I continue to self-print is so I can add an image to the line
> just as quick as a wink; I can take a shot today and have it up on
the
> website or in the catalog for sale by tomorrow.
>
>




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