How does wide-format digital print put consumers in the mood to shop ‘till they drop? Melony Rocque-Hewitt investigates.
When Halloween is finished and the last sparkler has gone cold from Bonfire Night, the cascading rush for all things Christmas explodes. For many PSPs, the week commencing 5 November is often one of the busiest of the year as clients ready themselves for their Christmas campaigns.
So this year, what’s the story? We put that question to Andy Wilson at Press on Digital Imaging, the Rochester, Kent-based PSP. Talking to Wilson in late October (the relative calm before the storm period) he identified a couple of key trends starting to emerge from his clients. Firstly, a demand for the printing of silvers, golds and coloured metallics, and secondly, a demand for 3D POS work – illustrating the growing importance of cutters for large-format print finishing.
Up country in Leeds, home to wide-format PSP Digital Plus, Simon Porter, sales and marketing director, answered the question in a different way. He says his company is being increasingly asked by its clients to give guidance on how to fully optimise the physical commercial space both in terms of promotional advertising and general ambience.
One of Digital Plus’ major retail clients is the Sheffield-based Shopping Centre, Meadowhall. It is currently the eighth largest shopping centre in the UK with 150 million square metres of retail and leisure space, 12,000 free parking spaces and an 11-screen cinema. Part of the first wave of out-of-town shopping malls, it was at the time of opening, the second largest shopping centre in the country.
Digital Plus has been servicing Meadowhall for the past two years or so, producing a whole range of display solutions for this 280-strong retail outlets plus 50 places to eat, which attracts about 25 million shoppers per year.
Porter believes that this subtle yet important change in emphasis to a wider consultative role is because Digital Plus can literally print onto any surface inside or out, and the implications of this has been fully digested by the company’s clients.
“For Meadowhall the substrates we are printing on are not ground breaking – in that we are using vinyls, self adhesives and all the usual suspects, but it’s the ideas themselves, they have become smarter.
“When we are selling our wide-format graphics capability, at the same time we are selling the potential. We ask our clients to have a greater awareness of the space. We know how to create impact, how to give our clients far more bang for bucks.”
Digital Plus is producing far more glass manifestation work and applying this to lifts – creating novel focal points as well as escalator displays. Floor graphics are being used for signage as well as promotional devices. Aesthetic displays are being added to areas, which in the past have being overlooked such as structural columns thus upping the tempo across the general ambience of the shopping experience.
“With so many companies looking to maximise the often limited space they have, we need to ensure we are helping them get maximum impact with eye-catching and creative displays. We have been fortunate to work with some of the UK’s largest companies and we use our experiences and successes to guide customers in the right direction. Many companies across the UK put their trust in us and it’s imperative that we continue to use this experience and knowledge to help support our customers in the future,” says Porter.
Tracking down Simon McKenzie at Hollywood Monster, the Birmingham-based PSP, is no easy task, but during a brief, snatched conversation ‘between client visits and installations, he says: “Large retailers, like Whistles, tend to have bigger budgets for window displays and graphics at Christmas as there is an expected increase in footfall. As retailers compete to entice customers with discounts and deals, they also want their shop front to be unique and eye-catching to passing trade."
Speaking of Whistles, last year the high street fashion retailer approached Hollywood Monster to design 'something new' for the seasonal period, across seven of its London stores. Hollywood Monster proposed the idea of giant Christmas decorations suspended from the ceiling as an alternative to festive-themed window graphics. Attaching the 3D foil concepts, such as bows, however, proved challenging as some stores had particularly high ceilings and had to employ small cranes to install them. At the time of speaking to McKenzie, it was still too early to talk about what Whistles or indeed many other clients had up their sleeves for Christmas 2012 but trends he believes will be big this year include the inclusion of LED lighting, for example, in snowflakes, and wide-format digital dye sublimation techniques to print onto textiles to create dramatic draping effects.
For Andy Delpech, operations director at the Berkshire-based Oasis Graphic Co, a mix and match approach is likely to be the order of the season. “As Christmas approaches we have been combining traditional print with other materials and applying them across a number of different substrates, which seems to be on trend at the moment,” he says.
“We have been mixing traditional four colour UV direct print with highly reflective metallic and holographic laminates to create very realistic snow effects. Applying this method onto various lightweight rigid substrates and printed vinyl, creating hanging banners and large format glass manifestations. The lightweight board we are using is 5mm KapaLine and KapaPlast from which we are also creating 3D standees, which have again been treated to the Oasis snow effect.”
And what of the materials providers? What have they noticed? Dave Varty, sales manager at Folex, says: "Our customers are continually looking for speciality media that can be offered to their clients in order to offer added-value solutions, and we often receive calls to the office from print providers looking for advice on which products and technologies would be suited to projects that they are working on.
“For Folex we concentrate a lot of effort in reaching out to specifiers, designers, creatives and brand owners in order to highlight areas in which certain materials can enhance consumer engagement. We also work closely with manufacturers to ensure that printable media meet the highest standards and are HP Latex and Epson GS media accredited for many of the materials offered in the market. With five new product releases alone in 2013 we know that the drive for differentiation is key to developing the market with innovative opportunities and as a flexible European based coater we strive to find those key trends that drive market thought.
“As a speciality media coater operating in many verticals Folex is naturally very application driven and current trends can be seen in printable removable or repositionable polyesters and of course the seasonal favourite for metallic and simulated metallics with our variety of silver bases. This area alone is up 400% in sales from the beginning of September. We also know that the requirement to produce screen separations from eco-solvent printers, rather than aqueous, is driving a market demand for asset utilisation within screen and display printers and with the launch of the new Reprojet ES CL we are well positioned to meet this long awaited solution which is already showing incredible growth," he says.