Retail guru of the moment Mary Portas has turned her expert eye to a variety of emporia, including charity shops, budget fashion retailers and ‘big shed’ furniture retailers.

Sadly, high-street printing businesses haven’t yet featured on her hit list. What, one wonders, would be the Portas view were her stiletto-clad feet to click-clack through the portals of print’s high-street exponents?

If the portal in question was that of AlphaGraphics Nottingham, Mary Queen of Shops would find the door firmly shut, and centre owner and managing director Jeremy Thompson Jewitt is more than happy to explain why: "One of the challenges of being in the city centre is that people want to come in and waste your time," he says. "We have a locked door nowadays because of undesirables coming in for things we don’t do, such as passport photographs. And we’ve implemented a minimum charge to deter people from wandering in for one photocopy."

Passing trade
In fact, the general irrelevance of passing trade is a common theme among printshop owners, whether they are located in a busy city-centre location, like Thompson Jewitt, or in a smaller conurbation.

"We don’t make money from walk-in business," concurs Colin Greaves, director of a group of Prontaprint businesses covering Milton Keynes, Leicester, and Northampton. Greaves and his co-director closed their remaining high-street premises in Northampton a year ago.

"All our operations are at industrial units or off high streets now. There are no tills or counters; we have a meeting room instead," he says. "We were arguing with people about 5p. People would walk in and expect you to drop everything."
Or perhaps they wander in for other reasons, as evidenced by the experiences at Kall Kwik Weston-super-Mare.

"We’re quite close to the museum and half of the people who come in are asking for directions to it," says centre owner Stuart Donovan, while musing about a potential new revenue stream – cost per chat. "People pop in and they want a photocopy of their driving licence. And they do like to chat. I sometimes think we should have a meter on the counter."

Donovan also bemoans the number of empty shops on his street, which isn’t a great help in creating any sort of retail buzz. The travails of the high street in general have been well-publicised – some 13% of shops were empty last year and big names such as HMV have announced further store closures since. And let’s face it, a printer is hardly a destination retail outlet.

Combine this with the fact that typical printshop customers and SME businesses are now likely to have access to sophisticated office printers, and a plethora of online printing services, it begs the question: what is the point of a print services provider remaining on the high street?

It seems the answer, in many cases, is there is no point. The most common response from business owners currently located at such a site is if they were starting over again with a blank sheet of paper, they wouldn’t be where they are.
As Greaves starkly puts it: "I don’t believe there is a high-street printing business any more.

"It’s not a benefit unless you are bang in the middle of a city centre," says Donovan. "We looked at moving but that would cost about £30,000 so it’s not really an option at the moment. Around 90% of our customers deal with us via phone or email."

Stuart Mason, managing director at Scotland’s Ink Shop Printing, is in the middle of closing of all his physical stores.
"The sheer volume of work being ordered online, combined with a whole load of other reasons, means that high-street stores don’t make sense for us any more," he says.

Mason’s business revamp includes a full-blown online ecommerce system, with a new website set to go live in the next couple of months.

Market research
"We did extensive research among our customers to find out whether they would continue, or stop using us if we didn’t have our stores and not one person said they would stop using us," he explains.

"Aberdeen, for example, had a very, very busy shop but we explained our plan to customers and they realised that it was better. But it’s still very important for us to sit with customers so we have our sales team on the road, and we have established ‘cyber shops’ with a phone line to the rep covering that area. We are keeping all the staff on."

One of Mason’s gripes is with city centre parking, which he describes as "ludicrous".

"Edinburgh is particularly bad – I don’t know what the council’s objective is but it’s the most anti-car city I know. Our customers are predominantly SME businesses and they simply do not have the time to leave their businesses, come to us, park, and give us work. They want an easy 24/7 solution and we have to address that."

For Thompson Jewitt at AlphaGraphics, parking in Nottingham is a similar irritant.

"Our city council seems to do everything it can to get businesses out of the city centre. It’s quite difficult and the traffic wardens are not as tolerant as they should be."

That said, he does recognise some advantages of the location. As well as being able to promote the brand and its offering, another important plus is the ability to attract suitable employees. "One benefit of being in the city centre is that getting staff is easier because people can get to work easily by bus or tram, and they like having all the city’s amenities on their doorstep."

Premises in busy locations certainly provide an opportunity to advertise one’s wares. Take the case of creative services specialist Adam B, which is located in central London, close to the heart of the capital’s media community. The printer’s quirky and eye-catching window displays are perfectly in tune with its target customers.

Pink Palace
Perhaps the ultimate example of making the most of a prominent location comes in the shape of Sutton’s SDC, aka ‘the Pink Palace’. Formerly the Sutton Dyeline Company, five years ago the firm developed its service offering and expanded into various other areas including signs, banners and posters.

Managing director Julie Carter takes up the story: "At one time we had loads of banners outside on the wall, but the council made us take them down. So we painted it pink. Everyone was laughing and tooting at us when we did it.

"It’s amazing what the change of colour has done, it’s been brilliant for business," Carter enthuses. "We’re on the main London road so there’s lots of passing traffic, hence we want to make the most we can of the windows. The main point is to attract attention," she says, and SDC’s unique look certainly achieves that aim.

"People come in and say they’ve driven past and noticed us. Digital print and graphics are creative and bold and so are we. The irony of it is I’m the least pink girl you could imagine," she adds.

While this shop-as-advertisement model obviously works for SDC, it’s not a strategy that retail analyst and commentator John Ryan would generally recommend as a cost-effective marketing option.

"Even if you use your premises as a giant 3D advert, you could reach a lot more people with an advertising budget that equates to the cost of that building," he says.

In fact, Ryan is unequivocal in his views about the future for high-street print: "I can see no reason why any smart person would open a high-street print shop. Not even someone with half a brain. If I were a Prontaprint or a Kall Kwik I’d be inclined to consider my options and think about what I could do with the space instead.

"I don’t see a future for these guys. These days I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind paying the rent required for high-street premises, especially as there’s an unpleasant habit in this country of upward-only rent reviews," states Ryan, who nevertheless firmly believes there are still plenty of reasons to shop on the high street as long as the retail experience is tuned to the target client. "It’s ‘give me a reason to come into your shop’. The trouble with a print shop is what can you do with a few stacks of A4 or A3?"

This sort of view will hardly be music to the ears of Sara Jamison, freshly-installed as chief executive at On Demand Communications, which owns the Prontaprint and Kall Kwik franchises.

"We have 215 centres across both brands and the majority are on the high street," Jamison states. "The walk-in trade is negligible. It’s about the brand presence.

"People know our brands, but therein lies the challenge. Is it a consumer brand, or is it a business-to-business brand? It’s predominantly B2B but we can never get away from the ‘can I have this photocopied’ customer."

Jamison believes that if you’re on the high street, then success has to come about through excellent service and making the most of the benefits that come with the location. She cites the example of one centre owner who is a ‘networker extraordinaire’, and who maximises every opportunity to forge closer bonds with his local business equivalents.

"It works brilliantly; he’s immersed in the local community. If you’re going to be on the high street and pay that premium, make it work for you," says Jamison.

Given that, in 1998, there were 242 branches of Prontaprint alone makes the scale of Jamison’s challenge in managing a shrinking network apparent. Yet, while it’s clear that venerable brands such as Prontaprint and Kall Kwik are dealing with present-day challenges caused by historical decisions about location, the picture at print’s newest high-street franchise is somewhat different.

Printing.com
Since 2000, Printing.com has built a UK network of some 290 outlets for its services, based around a central production hub model rather than lots of small print shops each with their own kit.    

Printing.com chief executive Tony Rafferty thinks the business is close to an industry first – a joined-up ‘clicks and mortar and bricks and mortar’ offering that works for all parties.

"We want to turn cold e-business into a symbiotic relationship between the online channel and our franchisees," he explains. "We’ve been carefully building this for the past two years. We believe it’s possible for there to be a harmonious relationship between what’s possible online and our outlets, which can look after the customer’s creative needs and come up with concepts that can then be used as online templates – as well as having a local network for when clients need more guidance than is available through an internet-only offering."

This will be a difficult trick to pull off, but with close to 300 franchisees to keep happy and a production pipeline to maintain, it’s easy to see why Rafferty and his team are determined to make it work.

One thing’s for sure, the high street is changing and one or two exceptions aside, it’s not a comfortable place to be. Thinking back to printshops past, namely W A Smith, which grew into today’s Lettershop Group, and the eponymous Pindar’s, it’s hard to imagine how any 21st-century high-street printing business could evolve in the same way.

THE HIGH STREET PROS AND CONS FOR PRINTERS
Advantages
• Easy for staff to get to and from work using public transport
• Can capitalise on being in heart of local business community
• Premises are also a promotional vehicle

Disadvantages
• Not a retail ‘destination’
• Passing trade now largely irrelevant
• Size/layout of high-street premises can be less than ideal
• Traffic/parking issues for staff, customers and deliveries
• High rental costs

TOP 10 WANTS ON THE HIGH STREET
• Post Office
• Newsagent
• Butcher
• Greengrocer
• Bank
• Café
• Pharmacy
• Hairdresser
• Public transport
• Parking

*Source: British Shops and Stores Association survey of consumers