Normally, you would have no reason to put cats, dogs, flowers, semi-nude models, Twilight and Cliff Richard in the same sentence. In the stock calendars market, however, you’d have to – these are the big hitting, high-selling themes that set the sector alight each Christmas and that are run off in their thousands on litho presses.

But things are changing in the calendars sector. The rise of digital print, personalisation technology and the web-to-print workflow has made one-off, bespoke calendars a reality – and they are becoming more and more popular.

The problem is judging which way the sector will go: will the bespoke digital market remain just a niche operation, or will it eventually usurp the position of its long-run litho counterpart?

It’s a dilemma also shared by those printers who are looking to carve out a slice of this still highly profitable market: is it a better opportunity for the litho printer with a lot of heavy metal firepower, or is it more suited to the digital operator with some extra capacity? Or, indeed, will it remain a viable opportunity at all, going forward?

Tale of two sectors
The traditional calendars market is split into two: consumer and business-to-business (B2B). The consumer side of things features the stock calendars you pick up in retailers such as WH Smith that feature things like football teams, pin ups or kittens emerging from cardboard boxes. Calendar Club, the retailer that pops up on the high street every year in the pre-Christmas period, will shift around 4m of these products this year.

"Our market is huge; it’s a real spread of ages and themes and run lengths," says Natalie Taylor, marketing manager at Calendar Club. "Our sales are made up of many more titles than there were 10 years ago and our total volumes are higher. When we started out in 1998, we had 12 stores. We now have 300 stores."

Steve Plackett, managing director of Calendar Club’s publishing and printing arm Vista Stationery & Print, says that less than 1% of the titles sold will be digitally printed. His average run length for a calendar is around 6,000 and he believes that if you’re selling into the high street, it just isn’t cost-effective to put any of that work on digital machines as "you’d be selling for less than it cost you to print it". The only time you would use digital, he says, is for testing.

"Next year I will test a few titles to regional areas – such as a Norwich calendar for that city specifically – and for that I will use digital technology," he says.

In the B2B market, things are just as litho orientated. Rose Calendars, for example, will produce around 1.5m calendars to be sold B2B this year, and for them digital technology remains a little-used option – again less than 1%. Commissioned to produce bespoke calendars for businesses, they personalise stock calendars for charities, organisations and businesses and marketing manager Gunni Page explains they do this through overprinted stock calendars.

"It’s not a question of a customer requesting 100 calendars of a set style with their plumbing logo on – we already have the calendars pre-printed, they are collated but not bound, and then the customer picks the images they want and we just print the logo on after," she reveals.

Both the B2B and consumer stock calendar markets are thriving and remain almost entirely litho-only sectors. Those operating in these sectors say they have no reason to believe that they are likely to shrink or that they would be required to make a substantial switch to digital to ensure their future presence in the calendars
market.

"The personalised, consumer calendar sector might be eating into our work a little, but if that is happening it is not having any meaningful impact as yet," says Plackett. "At the moment, the personalisation side of things is still quite niche."
That "as yet" is pertinent. For although the total volume of personalised calendars that are printed in runs of 10 at the most is significantly less than the litho stock and B2B calendars, the former’s rapid growth suggests this situation may not be the same in the future.

Harrier LCC, for example, prints personalised calendars for TruPrint, Snapfish and Tesco and it says it will produce around 300,000 calendars this year. Photobox, meanwhile, says that across its European operation, the number of personalised calendars will be "well into the millions". These numbers demonstrate the significant growth year-on-year the personalised calendars market is experiencing.

"Over the past five years, the number of calendars we are producing has gone up," says Mark Chapman, UK managing director at Photobox. "The numbers we are doing in the European market with personalised calendars is probably still a fraction of the total calendars being sold, but it is a significant fraction – it is by no means negligible as it once was."
"The general trend has been growth," agrees Julian Marsh, photo products and business development consultant at Harrier LLC. "However, some retailers have suffered by not keeping the level of marketing up. The marketing is crucial; even as early as October, businesses are discounting with two-for-one offers already, pushing the sales this early, and this is what really drives this side of market."

This cut-throat marketing comes from the fact that the digitally produced personalised calendars market, though relatively new, is much more heavily competitive than its long-run stock cousin and the acquisition of customers is tougher too.
A standard stock calendar is a known quantity to the consumer and a relatively easy purchase – one that is also often a spur of the moment buy. With the personalised calendar, retailers have to persuade the consumer to find the website, sit and use or download the personalisation software, upload pictures and create and customise the calendar. It is quite an ask of the time-conscious public, but Chapman believes that once you achieve it once, they won’t look back.

"The biggest challenge someone going in to this market will face, is that there are no cheap customers," he explains. "That said, once people make the transfer from stock to personalised, they don’t go back."

That could be seen as fighting talk between the two areas of the calendar market, but for the most part the two sectors don’t see themselves as adversaries. Rather, the two tend to complement each other and indeed some operators offer both services. The Herald Chase Group, for example, caters for both markets, with consumer facing personalisation services as well as B2B and stock capacity. This means they run both digital and litho kit and managing director Chris Goslar says this gives them more flexibility and increased business opportunities.

"It depends on the size and the quantity of the calendar as to how we print it – if someone orders more than 1,000 A3 calendars we would probably print litho and below that we would print digitally," he explains. "Having the one-off consumer service and the longer-run options is crucial for us, and helpful. Each can feed business into the other and as we have the capacity to produce both we don’t have to turn work away."

Digital costs
Goslar admits that the digital side of things requires the higher investment of the two and that his W2P software for his services has run into tens of thousands of pounds in development costs. Indeed, for those long-run calendar printers looking to move into digital, and for those with a digital press with some spare capacity looking to get a slice of the market, those already in the sector have some stark words of warning.

"If you do have spare capacity on your digital press then, in theory, yes, you can print off some calendars," says Marsh. "But the problem is that the printing is the easiest part of the process. Substantial investment is needed in workflow, finishing and fulfilment if you are ever going to be able to make a success of it. If you are going to make money you could be dealing with 30,000 unique consumers every day and to be able to do that you have to build the IT system to support it."

"I think people would find it tough, and I am not saying that because of any vested interest," adds Chapman. "You just have to go online and look at the prices some companies quote. It would take a brave man who would think that, from scratch, they could create a product, bring in customers and get a return at the sort of pricing levels that are around at the moment."

Things are not much easier for those looking to use some spare capacity on their B1 press for the B2B and stock consumer products, according to Plackett.

"Most won’t have the binding facility to produce calendars, so they’d have to outsource the wire binding," he explains. "The trouble with that is that the binding and packing costs more than the printing. The finishing side is much more specialised than people realise."

End-to-end service
Rose Calendar’s Page adds that the B2B and stock sector also requires more than just a printing service – the customer wants a one-stop shop. Hence, Rose Calendars has design and fulfilment services, licensed products and exclusive deals with artists and photographers for content – which all requires significant investment.

The high costs of entering both the high volume stock/B2B markets and the personalisation market goes some way to explaining why those already in the sector are keeping to what they know best and to where they already have an established name – the costs of adding the other market to their services is prohibitive. Likewise, for those printers seeing the ever-growing work up for grabs while sitting on idle press capacity, the challenges can look insurmountable.
If some are still tempted to take the plunge, then the benefits of the stock calendars is that the market is a much more viable opportunity if it is to be a main part of the business – unlike the personalised market which is centred in the few months preceding Christmas, Page says the long-run market is an all-year business with sales made across the year. The presses are also busy throughout, laying down stock for the pre-Christmas rush.

That said, those on the digital side of the fence argue that this method of laying down stock does not fit with the current need to drive out waste in retail. They add that the long-term savings of the just-in-time model make an investment in personalisation and digital more viable.

"A lot of the time you find that buying bulk calendars leaves retailers in January with bulk stock they can’t shift and so have to discount heavily," says March. "If the calendars are produced on-demand digitally, then they get around that problem. Yes, they might be able to get 100,000 litho printed calendars very cheaply, but in the long term that saving may be eaten up by warehousing, handling and distribution costs, and discounted sales in the post-Christmas period. So on-demand becomes the better value option."

It’s a compelling argument. If the investment is made in digital set-ups then a company could feasibly cater for the personalisation market and a more on-demand retail market as well. The trouble is, digital print has been around a while and the latter has not happened, neither does it show any signs of happening.

And so for those in the calendar market already, there is no reason to change what they are doing currently – there is no indication that one side of the market is eating into the other, nor that the current status quo will change. And for those wanting to get in on the action, it’s a straight – but expensive – choice between to very difficult, but rewarding markets. As Marsh admits, it’s a rare situation of positives across the board. "The two calendar markets are not adversaries, really, they are complementary and both very successful. We find that our consumers will have both stock calendars and personal calendars, they are not mutually exclusive."