ARTISAN PRINT SOLUTIONS
Vital statistics
Location Kingston Bagpuize, Oxfordshire
Inspection host Daren Elsley, managing director
Size Turnover: £1.2m; staff: 12
Established As Artisan Litho by Neil Buckingham in 1995
Products Commercial print including DM, wide-format, web-to-print items and cross-media campaigns
Kit Roland SolJet XC-540 printer-cutter, five-colour Heidelberg SM 74, five-colour Heidelberg SM 52, single-colour Heidelberg GTO 52, Xerox 700 and a range of finishing kit including a Seal 62 Base laminator, Polar 92 guillotine, Heidelberg Stahlfolder T52 and a Duplo System 4000 bookletmaker
Inspection focus Attracting school clients by offering a comprehensive, proactive and accessible service portfolio
The challenge
Miles of ‘greige’ linoleum flooring and fluorescent tube lighting as far as the eye can see. School days might be the best of your life, but they’re rarely very adventurous in the decor stakes. No wonder, then, that just a whiff of institution-strength disinfectant reminds even those who remember their school days with fondness, of the feeling of having to go somewhere really quite unpleasant.
Printers working with schools could be forgiven, then, for treating them as a quite different species to other types of customers. Schools are there after all to provide a serious, educational function, not to court customers with glossy marketing materials or create an enticing environment, as a shop or cinema is, say.
So it might be assumed that, beyond suggesting a few different formats for prospectuses and school brochures, there’s not much opportunity for printers to upsell. But that, says Oxfordshire-based Artisan Print Solutions, is where you’d be wrong.
The company started life as a one-press litho printing outfit, Artisan Litho, back in 1995, in premises that served previously as a Second World War aircraft hangar and then chicken shed, bizarrely enough. As the print industry evolved and the company expanded, it realised that offering more than litho to its education, charity, hotel and SME customers was going to be key to survival.
Today the company offers digital print, web-to-print, cross-media and, as of around four years ago, wide format print services. And it’s crucial, says managing director Daren Elsley, that the company offers the 10 schools it now works for, a full range of formats and ideas, including web-to-print and wide-format.
The method
The company packages this offering as ‘Artisan Complete School Solutions’, and Elsley says you might be surprised at the kinds of print items even his public sector clients go for. Those of us who remember school as a rather drab, uninviting space might be surprised to hear that many schools are now getting wise to making corridors and classrooms more inspiring with a bit of low-cost wide-format print.
“Those will be inspirational images of people like Nelson Mandela, sportsmen and women, or it might be famous, inspiring quotes,” says Elsley. “If it’s the foreign languages department there might be an image of an inspirational person relevant to that. They transform the corridor really nicely.”
Elsley explains that many schools now feel under pressure to attract as many children as possible to ensure funding. The result is institutions courting parents of prospective pupils almost as keenly as your average marketer.
“What I’ve found is that with state schools now becoming academies, they obviously want to up their game and look more presentable to parents and students; each school has to fight their corner,” says Elsley. “They want to increase their numbers as they’re fighting with schools in the same catchment area, so the parents need to be inspired when they walk in. So schools are putting a lot more graphics up.”
He adds: “I think schools are more aware now that their branding has to be right and that they need to have a higher profile; their brochures need to be good quality.”
Where schools ordering print do differ from your average marketer, however, is on how much time they have to dedicate to the task. This is why offering them a Complete School Solution, or rather having the kit and expertise to produce a wide range of materials, is key.
“Schools haven’t got the resources to have a print buyer, just someone needing one point of contact who knows the printer’s going to be competitive and they can rely on the quality,” says Elsley. “It’s about being a one-stop shop and willing to talk people through all the options. I think the schools really value the breadth of knowledge we’ve got. We can advise not just on litho, but large-format and digital too.”
He adds: “I often take samples in from other schools to show them what’s possible. We offer a square-back system now, rather than just straight saddle-stitching and that’s been useful for adding value if people want something a bit more high-end, for yearbooks for example. That’s lay-flat so you haven’t got the cost of perfect binding.”
So highly important is to treat the school’s ‘print buyer’ like any other and not assume they won’t be interested in more ‘decorative’ print and services such as web-to-print (a couple of Artisan’s education customer do now order brochures in this way online). But at the same time, it’s important to realise that schools even more than other sorts of customer, value a close working relationship.
“I think keeping it local helps. People do like to use local businesses that they have a relationship with,” says Elsley.
Even further cementing these close relationships is the school project element of Artisan’s ‘Complete School Solutions.’ Of real value to some of the schools is the chance to get students involved with designing and printing a yearbook for example, with students invited to the Artisan site.
“Normally with schools, they’ll have year groups with 10 or 15 students developing the yearbook. They can do the design or we can help them with that process,” says Elsley.
He adds: “We’re just doing a yearbook for a girls’ school. I go to the school and brief them and then have monthly meetings. I liaise with the kids and say ‘you can do that, you can’t do that’. Then I go back later with a proof.”
Then it’s a case of the kids coming along to the Artisan site to see the books being printed and finished. “Normally we cheat a bit. If they came in from right at the start they’d be here all day. So it’s a bit like the baking you see on the TV,” says Elsley. “We have it all prepared so they just see the end of it. So they see it finished off on the press, they see a few plates come out, they see the guillotining work.”
The result
This initiative has proved very popular with the majority of the schools Artisan deals with, reports Elsley. “It doesn’t fit with what some schools want to do at the moment, but it’s there,” he says. “It’s just another tool for us to use. Hopefully, the other printer they might be looking at doesn’t offer this. That just gives us another little tick in the box.”
A potentially wider reaching positive effect, is of course ensuring the next generation is aware of the possibility of a career in print. Elsley says this is a highly rewarding part of the scheme, with the kids’ excitement at seeing high-tech print technology also a good morale boost for staff.
“We’ve been in print for 25 years so we have to be careful we don’t stop seeing it as exciting because we’ve been doing it for so long,” says Elsley. “It reminds you of how amazing it is when people come in and you see their faces, and they’re going ‘oh my God!’”
He adds: “It’s trying to inspire the kids to perhaps consider a career in print. Printing isn’t really spoken about at school as far as I’m aware. When I was at school it was a well regarded apprenticeship, whereas now, I don’t think that many kids know about print.”
Of course, Complete School Solutions aren’t all about the school visits. The other element is offering a complete range of formats, and not being afraid to suggest wide-format and marketing products that you might not normally expect a school to go for. And this approach is working very nicely for Artisan.
The number of schools the business caters for has grown from just a couple a few years ago to 10 today. Combined with healthy take-up from the other SME, charity and hotel customers Artisan works with, this has led to the company seeing steady growth in turnover over the past couple of years, to boast a £1.2m turnover now.
For Artisan, then, going back to school is far from an ominous prospect. And in fact, with attractive wide-format graphics an important part of the printer’s ‘Complete School Solutions’, the company is making heading into school much more pleasant than before.
DO IT YOURSELF
Following suit
Artisan has found that being a one-stop shop for schools has been a great way of securing work and an ongoing relationship with them. This requires the printer to be expert in a wide range of print processes, something that won’t suit every business. “It’s not just the case that we offer lots of different formats, it’s the fact we have the expertise to back this up too,” says Elsley. “I think schools really value the breadth of knowledge that we’ve got.”
Inviting a group of lively young-sters into their premises is obviously something else that not all printing companies are geared up for:
“You’ve got to have a nice environment for the kids to come to. You’ve got to a be a printer with a nice building.”
Potential pitfalls
Printers also shouldn’t underestimate the challenge of inspiring young minds. Your company will need someone suitably charismatic to do this. “You’ve got to like kids and be able to engage them,” says Elsley. “Neil Buckingham, who owns Artisan, is great at talking to them, that’s why it has worked. If it was all a bit stiff and starchy they wouldn’t have enjoyed it. If you were a bit boring, you’d make print sound boring.”
Resigning yourself to the fact that certain processes will always appeal to teenagers’ gorier sides and using these to get people interested in wider issues is a trick he’s picked up, says Elsley: “The guillotine usually engages them the most. When they see that blade cut through all that paper, they all ask the same thing: ‘Has anyone ever had their arm cut off?!’”
Top tips
Don’t underestimate the need of both private and state schools to create appealing environments and market themselves to parents. Offer new formats here as you would elsewhere.
Be willing to offer detailed advice to the person ordering print, remembering they won’t necessarily be print experts.
Keep school visits interesting by timing the job so your visitors see a bit of everything.
Elsley’s top tip
“It’s building trust and offering the service and the quality and good pricing. It’s building a relationship.”
