Minor Adjustment – Bigger Space

May 27, 2010

Share One of the things we initially liked about our Social Print Experiment was the tiny space we had found, just slightly larger than the press itself. We called it the Highly Optimized Production Space (HOPS) but it’s also known as the Extremely Tight Hard To Work Space (no acronym there). Work coming off the [...]

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Marketing – 10 Cent Color Sales

May 12, 2010

Share As you can see from our production capacity, we have a lot of unused hours that the press could be better utilized. We’re using it less an half an hour a day if you divide out the number of hours in a month the press is in printing mode. It’s not great utilization for [...]

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Business Development – IKON Business Booster

May 10, 2010

Share We’ve been looking at some additional ways to grow sales using a business development service, such as Market Movers from Kodak or perhaps more local, a company like IKON. Ideally, both companies offer their services as part of a package price by purchasing a Kodak NexPress or a Ricoh C900, but they also do [...]

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Hunting for Elk

April 21, 2010

Share A long-time friend and mentor, Chuck Surprise, brought up something in a conversation we had recently. Chuck was a pioneer in typography and digital prepress back in the early ’80s as I guess CTO/Visionary of Central Graphics, if he had had a title. I started there in 1990 as a typesetter but quickly moved [...]

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Tools of (Our) Trade

April 15, 2010

Share It’s been about three months now since we launched, and I thought I would run through the tools we’re using now, and how they’ve impacted our business. We’re always evaluating new (different) tools, but so far on our list there hasn’t been a compelling reason to look for something else. PageDNA – Web2Print. Overall, [...]

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Just Throw It In, Please

April 13, 2010

Share I was out visiting print shops today, and in my travels stopped at a long-time friend’s place. He’s been a printer for maybe 25 years now, and very outspoken about the industry. He’s also a cross between a tradeshop and a retail print shop, but most of his customers are print sales reps from [...]

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Printelope – The New Price List

April 6, 2010

Share After a few weeks of work, we finally finished the price list for Printelope, the printing company we write about in the Social Print Experiment. The price list is all about the things that we offer that our MGI DP60 press does really well, and hence, makes us a good profit. Our price list [...]

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Social Print Experiment – Episode 4

March 30, 2010

Share This is our longest episode yet, at just over 15 minutes. In this new episode, we get the CEO report about the profitability of the Social Print Experiment; answer the question as to whether or not we’re for real; brainstorm on a marketing strategy (one of many to come); and get a review of [...]

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There’s a Fungus Among Us

March 29, 2010

Share When I told my friend Ralph Mittman from PrintPost late last year that I was going to open a print shop again, he told me to stand still while he hit me in the head with a 2×4. “Don’t do it, you’ll regret it,” he cautioned. I ignored his advice, but I think about [...]

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Digital Press Color Management

March 22, 2010

Share The number of acquisitions we’ve gone through for the Social Print Experiment is dwindling down, and now it seems like we can look at some things to fine tune our production workflow. One of the things I would like to explore more is color management for digital presses. Our MGI DP60 does a very [...]

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