Founded in 2017 by husband and wife Mark Hannant and managing director Munni Trivedi, who relocated to India in 2009, Indigo Premedia aims to give clients “hassle-free access to ‘on demand’ production talent” across a raft of specialisms.
“We realised that there is an opportunity in India – there’s knowhow, there’s capability, there’s great technicians – there are a lot of benefits of using resource from here,” Trivedi, a former London-based agency executive, print buyer, and production director, told Printweek.
“India is a very complex market – in the ‘Ease of doing business’ rankings it doesn’t score very well. We headquartered the business out of Singapore because it’s very efficient for business and gives us a foothold in South East Asia.
“We use different parts of South and South East Asia [to place work] depending on the requirement. We’re using a low-cost base, a lot of the work is done out of various partners in India, but it depends.”
The business said outsourcing is becoming more attractive to creative agencies as a way to reduce costs, solve capacity issues, and manage fixed costs, particularly as they embrace remote work and hybrid models.
While it provides four primary in-house services; publishing, research, packaging, and moving image, Trivedi said the company could also call on its printer contacts to help agencies, print buyers, or even other printers to manage the outsourcing of pre-press and production work.
She added the business would use suppliers local to the client if a job requires a fast turnaround, as while a job would be cheaper to print in India, once shipping charges and potential delays at borders are taken into account, it would only be viable if the quantity was large enough.
“Recently we created a digital booklet for a presentation; the end client in the US was running a workshop via its UK subsidiary and wanted the booklet printed, so we quickly rejigged it and found the right printer that was close enough to the client and could turn it around in time and in budget. We managed that all from here.”
Recognising “a big opportunity in the UK”, this summer the company opened its new UK arm Indigo Premedia UK (IPUK), based in Canary Wharf.
In July the business appointed entrepreneur and B2B marketing specialist Peter Neve as chair, to spearhead IPUK, and in the last few weeks it has increased the UK team to two after taking on a new salesperson.
The company particularly specialises in the collation of report and accounts documents, where it receives the financial data and often a design template from the client and then collates, proofreads, and quality controls the document, and then returns it to the client ready for production.
“We realised a long time ago that there’s no point using large banks of freelancers, what you need is teams. If we need to turn around annual reports – 90 pages designed, proofread, and quality controlled overnight – that takes a team,” said Trivedi.
“A designer in Soho could do the layout and theme, and setup a template, but the [data] comes across to my team via secure servers. My team are ISO accredited for security – we have to have that quality assurance – and it’s all secure because with this information we have to be GDPR compliant, it cannot leak.”
She added: “We vet our partners to the tee, because you’re only as good as your supply chain. It’s not just about cost, our partners are very specialised in each of [the areas that we serve].
“And it’s not just about price – yes you can save, there’s a huge saving to be made on the publishing side – but there’s no point in getting it cheaper if the quality isn’t right and you have to work really hard to get your files in the right way.”
