Connections
Low-Cost Posters for Theatre Troupes
Here in Indianapolis, we have a vibrant, thriving independent theatre community (so vibrant, in fact, that I spelled “theatre” the fancy way, with “re” at the end).
Each summer is the Indy Fringe Festival, an independent theatre festival, held just a couple miles from our office is Massachusetts Avenue. Mass Ave, as it’s known to the locals, has a cluster of independent theaters, and for 10 days, it’s overrun with theatre goers, buskers, and the actors themselves who visit each others’ shows and hang out at the bars and restaurants along 5-block district northeast of downtown Indy.
So what do theatre troupes have to do with a printing blog? A lot, actually.
As I travel up and down Mass Ave, there’s one theater — Theater on the Square — which has some of the best posters promoting their plays I’ve seen in town.
Sadly, I can’t walk anywhere without casting my printer’s eye on any printed material, so I’m always impressed by these posters. They’re bright, they’re colorful, they’re well-designed.
And they’re huge.
I would love to see more theaters (and theatres) use poster printing technology like TOTS uses. Most people have the mistaken belief that posters are expensive, or that you need to order thousands of posters to get a decent price break.
Not at all. Thanks to wide-format printing technology, like the Legend 72HUV UV curable ink jet printer. We have one of these in our shop, and I’m continually impressed by what it can do.
First, it prints to nearly any surface or substrate — we once printed to a full-size door, another time we printed to a 3′ x 6′ piece of 1/2″ plywood. Second, it’s like a giant inkjet printer (okay, it is a giant inkjet printer), which means it does full-color printing, including photos and funky poster designs. Third, it’s UV ink, which means it’s environmentally friendly and non-toxic. And fourth, you can print out short runs of full-color pages for a fraction of the cost of a traditional offset printer.
So what does that mean to theatre troupes?
Imagine printing giant posters promoting your play on vinyl, Gator board, or even a door. Imagine printing rehearsal photos, cast photos, and all kinds of great colors and backgrounds for your posters. Imagine printing only a few hundred full-color flyers on glossy paper, not several thousand.
Even if you’re not a theatre troupe in Central Indiana, there are still ways to find this technology in your area. Contact us at (877) 626-6848, and we’ll be happy to locate a Legend 72HUV sign shop in your area.
Photo: Kevin Burkett
Network With Other Sign Shops to Increase Your Own Sign Revenue
With the economy being down, people are cutting costs all over. And sign shops are no exception. I’ve talked to a lot of sign shop owners over the past several months who are all saying the same thing: revenues are down because fewer people — realtors, trade shows, stores — are buying signs. They’re getting beat up on price, and quality is not the issue it once was.
The natural thing to do is cut prices so you can increase sales, right?
It’s also the wrong thing to do. This is not the time to cut costs, because reducing your prices means reducing your profits. And with lower sales, this is the wrong time to lower profits. Rather, it’s the time to diversify.
Most sign shops don’t do every kind of sign. Some offer vinyl banners, others do restaurant signs, other do fast signs for trade shows.
What it’s going to take is one smart sign shop owner to invest into a new piece of equipment, like the Legend 72HUV from Digital Equipment Company, a UV curable wide format printer.
The really cool thing about this machine (and there are several cool things) is that it’s like a giant inkjet printer, which lets you make full-color signs without all the extra costs of vinyl, and none of the chemical issues found in VOC inks.
Most sign shops would look at this printer as just another piece of equipment that’s going to sit silently in the shop, along with everything else.
But the smart sign shop owner will see this as a revenue generator. Rather than beating your brains out to find the end users who will need this kind of sign, get all the sign shop owners in your town to do the work for you.
You probably know all the sign shop owners in your town, and know the things they do and don’t do. Pay a visit to each of them, and offer them your UV sign printing services. Then, whenever the vinyl shop gets a customer inquiry to do something outside their scope of expertise, instead of turning down the project, they can still sell it to the customer, wholesale it to you, and you both make a sale.
They generate a 10 – 15% brokerage fee, and you make a wholesale deal that pays for the machine and keeps it running, even while your own vinyl machine is sitting idle.
Now your competition has just become a source of revenue for you. They’re not working against you, they’re working for you.
Here at Lloyds, we’ve seen people who got into the wholesale business of printing and dropped their retail business completely. It ends up being a bigger win for them, because instead of one shop owner selling to a handful of customers, they have five, or even ten, owners selling for them instead.
The Benefits of UV Printing
I believe that UV printing is the future of commercial printing. There are just too many advantages, including its fast curing speeds, high print qualities, durability and flexibility, for ultraviolet printing not to become the new standard.
Flexibility
With UV printing, you can print on almost any surface, absorbent or not. Here at Lloyd’s of Indiana, we once ran a door through our UV printing machine and it worked great.
That flexibility translates to hundreds of uses at the local print shop level – small retail items, book covers, clings, cards, large banners, the list is almost endless. And with this new found ability to print on traditionally non-porous surfaces like Styrene or hard boards, customers are starting to pay attention.
High Print Qualities
No more double passes through the press, no more re-runs. UV printing allows for high-gloss levels, vibrant colors, an array of coatings and printing that’s crisp and has a nice finished look. That’s because UV inks tend to sit on top of the printed surface, rather than being absorbed into it. The end result is sharper and crisper.
Durability
UV printing is also more resistant to scratches, wear and tear, and sun exposure than its traditional printing counterparts. Customers love that a large promotional piece isn’t going to become tired and sun-worn after a few weeks.
Fast Curing Speeds
With UV printing, the ink is dry the moment it comes off the press. No more waiting for the ink to dry, no more waiting to do proofs, no more ghosting of images on the page above it. Instead, press checks are quick and you can move on to binding and finishing faster. Not only is it faster for your clients, it saves you time too.
UV printing isn’t the little-known secret of the printing world anymore; customers are starting to ask for it by name. They want that speed, durability, high print quality and surface flexibility that ultraviolet printing can offer. Don’t get left behind.
New Printing Technology is Changing How Signs & Banners are Printed
Wide format, UV Curable printing is changing the print industry and if you’re not on board, you’re going to miss out. I’ll admit that when I was first introduced to UV Curable printers, I was a little hesitant because sometimes products that tout higher capacities and lower costs often come with a hitch – like lower quality, particularly in the banner printing industry.
But, ever since we brought our first UV Curable printer into the Lloyds of Indiana office, I’ve been a convert. These machines consistently put out high quality, versatile print jobs for a fraction of the costs of traditional cut vinyl methods.
They can cut labor costs by up to 75%, lower printing costs by 65% and increase your production capacity by 65%. And because of their speed, quality and reliability, they’re quickly becoming a mainstay in most print shops – meaning if you don’t have one, your competitor probably does and he’s already undercutting you on prices.
The Legend 72HUV wide-format printer [(which we sell) costs less than $80,000, but it goes way beyond entry-level. This beast of a printer can print full-graphics directly to a sign or almost any surface and it can do a standard banner printing job in about 7 minutes. The best part? It does it for about $0.28 per square foot (putting it on par with single cut vinyl methods).
I’m also consistently amazed by the variety of surfaces that you can print on with this machine. It goes way beyond basic banner printing. You can print on any flat surface, including rigid media, or mediums like paper, cloth or vinyl. We once used it to print on a door.
I can’t say it enough though – if you’re running a high-traffic print shop or you want to be a high-traffic print shop and you’re not using wide format UV Curable printing methods, you’re missing out.