Sophie’s World - “I didn’t know you could do that”-Image Reports

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Sophie’s World - “I didn’t know you could do that”

"With everyone chasing the same slice of the market, isn’t now the time to
consider more challenging opportunities and to tackle them instead of
discarding them?"

As we teeter on the brink of probable recession and watch the UK economy crumble, there are many companies who have invested comparatively heavily in wide-format digital equipment during the past decade. Even this time last year there was a heady optimism for businesses, small and large, to up their ink-jet capabilities and widen their service offerings. Today, however, the aura of doom and gloom is spreading but, having said that, there’s a huge advantage in most of these investments — and that’s versatility.
I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has said to me, when I’ve been droning on about digital output, “oh, I didn’t know you could do that”. For those of us who know what the possibilities are with machines and, of course, their limitations we’re probably well aware of their production capabilities. We’ve moved beyond many traditional uses and found different and, sometimes, peculiar jobs that were never in our remit but which happened along through a bit of experimentation or purely by chance. So we’ve played around with pre-production and machine output and discovered potential opportunities that have added a different dimension to what we were originally expecting. Samples and tests have been printed and tweaked and printed again. And then? Well, many of them just get stacked up in a corner gathering dust.
In my daily e-mail mountain I normally get one or two enquiries from designers, agencies and, even, Joe Public. These are people looking for print solutions that don’t fall under the standard headings you get when hitting the search button on Google. They’re probably not multi-million pound contracts, and some of the requests are for products which will never work in a thousand years. Others certainly represent a challenge, and there are those that digital bureaux and display producers have been aware of all the time but never thought to tell anyone. But spreading the versatility of wide-format can do wonders for promoting the ideas that digital print can turn into reality. With everyone chasing the same slice of the market, isn’t now the time to consider more challenging opportunities and to tackle them instead of discarding them?
The truth is that, in general, the man in the street doesn’t have much of a clue how a piece of display print is produced. Because it looks good, he thinks it must be hideously expensive and terribly complex to produce. What he doesn’t appreciate is that he can walk into his local print service provider or sign-maker, throw an idea across the table, and have it turned into a product including a one-off or low volume result.
We’re all very good at promoting our companies to people who know what they want. Generalisations like posters, banners, graphics and signs are terminology we all understand and we know that these broad descriptions offer an umbrella which hides all sorts of less obvious applications. Even in the past week people have contacted me wanting to know if it’s possible to produce items which you’d never normally see advertised as part of a company's production repertoire. For example, I had a call from a magician who wanted a pack of A0 sized playing cards printed on rigid media but which were light-weight enough for him to transport on his own in the back of his van (52 and a couple of jokers would be pretty heavy in acrylic); try searching for that one on the Internet. I often get asked about unusual jobs, such as personalised roller blinds, some double-sided which have the business name on the window side and a graphic or display on the inside, and one or two queries recently have been for giant jigsaw puzles. Another regular poser is from photographers and artists who want prints produced on anything, ranging from Dibond to glass. These people, and others, simply don’t know if these jobs are feasible and the reason is that not many display producers have actually thought about broadening their service descriptions and actually promoting some of the versatility they can tackle. Small ads and web sites often look as though they’re designed to attract either the competition or the trade and, for digital print companies wanting to find new and interesting jobs, it’s the end customer who is going to come up with ideas and not the display producer. If he can’t find what he wants using layman’s terminology, he’s going to run out of luck, options and patience pretty quickly.
There are plenty of untapped opportunities out there. True, many of them aren’t going to be vastly lucrative but what they will do is open new doors to unusual applications and many of these can result in niche markets that haven’t yet been exploited. Now’s the time to start thinking about who you can target. Does your promotional material and web site actually demonstrate the versatility of your company’s services? Let’s start telling people what we can really do.

Sophie can be reached at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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