Photobox has plans to be a billion-pound player, a challenge even for a firm that has had such a meteoric rise in its 15-year history. In 2014 sales rose 18% to top £175m with an underlying gross profit margin of 52%. Its range includes personalised products such as mugs and phone and tablet covers. Its financials state: “mobile devices have opened up product opportunities, with sales of personalised tablet and smartphone covers 150% higher”.
Although Photobox isn’t your everyday print firm, its experience suggests that personalised product printing is a high-margin and high-growth market, which could make it worth a look.
“Giftware and promotional products offer higher margins than a lot of standard wide-format print,” says Damon Piall, general sales manager at Xpres, another firm that specialises in selling the machines and consumables for product decoration.
Product decoration isn’t new; printing onto objects has been around for years using processes such as pad and screen-printing. However, it’s yet another sector being transformed as digital technology makes it easier to enter and make one-offs cost-effectively.
What markets?
Broadly speaking the major markets are promotional products, personalised products and giftware.
Promotional products is a business-to-business market. Personalised products are more likely to be things that consumers want customised. Giftware is generally made up of products that will be for someone other than the purchaser. These latter categories are consumer markets. For printers who are part of the local community the mix of orders from other small businesses and individuals may be a good fit. For firms who find dealing with the public a challenge too far, there are options to offer trade services for other businesses and brands.
“Your clients are probably placing their promo items somewhere else,” says Piall. “Traditional print firms are well placed because of their understanding of colour, ink and quality. They can be ahead of the curve – it’s the same printer and workflow with a different substrate.”
What products?
With the range of different printing technologies it is possible to print onto pretty much anything within reason. Mugs and pens are the most popular promotional products with USB sticks, keyrings, rulers coasters, mouse mats, phone and tablet cases also commonplace. Giftware includes medals, trophies and presentation boxes. Other possibilities include glasses, toys, models, dice, tabletops, paintbrushes, fishing weights and board games.
The range of materials that can be printed onto is broadening out too, especially as UV-cured inkjet printers become more widespread and with the combination of white inks, primers and UV curing can print onto pretty much anything.
What technology is available?
UV-cured inkjet is just the latest digital print technology to enter the product decoration space; it joins dye-sublimation and transfer printing, both of which are relatively long established.
Dye-sublimation for product decoration is the same fundamental process as for textile printing. An inkjet printer with special dye-sub inks prints the image onto a transfer paper. That image is then transferred under heat and pressure to the final material. The heat of the press turns the dried ink from a solid to a gas (the sublimation bit), which once transferred to the object solidifies once again. Just as with textiles for the process to work the receiver either needs to be made from polyester or have a polyester coating into which the ink can penetrate.
In transfer printing the image is formed from the toner of a digital printer. It is more like the process of applying decals to an Airfix kit or a temporary tattoo. The paper the image is printed onto is designed to make it easy under heat to remove the toner image and transfer it to another surface to which it will adhere permanently once cooled.
The arrival of the UV inkjet machines has caused an increase of interest in product decoration as an application, although users prefer to rely on the other technologies for reasons including price, ease of use and application.
Both transfer printing and dye-sublimation need heat presses to move the image from the donor paper onto the product, adding a step and extra time to the production process. The need for heat and pressure limits the range of materials and the sizes and shapes that can be printed. For sublimation the temperature needed is around 190°C, so any material liable to scorch, burn or melt is unsuitable for printing on.
Picking a process
Price is a crucial factor, both for the initial set-up and day-to-day running. Set-up costs can be extremely low with entry-level dye-sub and transfer printers.
“I’d suggest sublimation to get started,” says Piall. “The initial investment can be as low as £250 for printer, templates and paper – all you need to add is the heat press. You can get started for less than a grand, and there’s not much of a loss if it doesn’t work out.”
If you do find business taking off the costs of larger and more productive equipment is reasonable.
“The investment isn’t huge, our SureColor SC-F6000 44in printer and a heat press is less than £5,000,” says Epson Europe product manager LFP textile Neil Greenhalgh.
As dye-sub is the dominant technology there are plenty of printable blanks available for the most common decorated products. These are either made from polyester or have had a polyester coating applied.
Where the objects you want to print aren’t available in polyester or with a coating, or if they are coloured, it is possible to use transfer or UV inkjet printing.
For Nicol at The Magic Touch transfer is the obvious choice: “A transfer printer can do anything a UV-cured printer can for a tenth of the cost.”
He sells an OKI A4 laser printer with white ink for £2,000. A heat press will cost an additional £800; there is also an A3 machine for £6,000 although as most products are small and the A4 machine takes oversize sheets up to 210x410mm he argues that in most cases the bigger size is unnecessary.
UV printers are more expensive, although not 10 times the price. The compact flatbeds start at £12,499 for Roland DG’s Versa UV 12. It prints an area just under A4, while bigger A3 models such as the Mimaki UJF 3042 and Mutoh ValueJet 426UF cost £16,995 and £14,950 respectively.
The attraction of UV is that you can print directly onto a wide range of materials including metals, plastics, glass and stone producing robust results. In addition to four-colour, white and clear inks it’s also possible to cold foil using Isub’s DigiFoil option on the Mimaki.
Shape and size may be the biggest challenge for product decoration. While inkjets can print onto products up to 150mm deep and you can get heat presses for both flat and cylindrical objects such as mugs, if the shape is too complex it can be a problem with any process. There is some leeway with the surface flatness in inkjet – a few millimetres – which means some surface undulation and extreme texture can be handled. It’s even possible to print spherical objects such as golf balls as long as the image isn’t too big.
The challenge when using a UV printer is holding the objects flat under the heads.
“You will need jigs, which start at about a hundred pounds and can go up to several hundred,” says Stuart Cole, national sales manager, industrial products, at Mimaki distributor Hybrid.
“For one-offs and prototyping you may get away with Blu-Tack.”
For dye-sub it’s possible to transfer onto more tricky shapes using an oven rather than a heat press.
“We work with a firm called Sublitech, it offers a dye-sub film and a vacuum oven, so you can transfer onto shapes, not just flat things,” says Epson’s Greenhalgh.
Show & sell
“If you can get samples in front of customers the opportunities are endless,” he adds. “The hardest thing is not the money for the investment or the skill to operate the kit, it’s that you need to be entrepreneurial.”
Nicol says that the output from the kit can help sell itself: “You can’t knock on doors and no one reads emails. Direct mail works, but better than hard copy is a tangible item. Send prospects and existing customers a mug or a notebook. It’s cheaper, easier and much more acceptable than tickets to a sporting event or a meal, especially if it’s useful.”
You’re unlikely to become a billion-pound business from product decoration but it’s certainly possible to make a good return for a limited outlay, which in a historically capital intensive industry like print has got to be worth a closer look.
CASE STUDY
Surefire Print & Design
Surefire Print & Design added product decoration to its general commercial and wide-format services three years ago by purchasing a Ricoh GX e7700N dye-sub set-up. It now makes up 20% of the Weybridge, Surrey based firm’s business.
A requirement to print onto matt mugs led it to The Magic Touch to buy an OKI C711 printer with white toner.
“We saw the range of applications and had a go at pushing it,” says managing director Simon Garrett. “A customer came to us who wanted to print onto leather. People told us we couldn’t do it, so that made me want to succeed.”
Printing onto leather has since become a niche for the firm, securing it business in fashion, film and motorsports, in addition to a contract with a Belgian firm to print bespoke leather jackets.
