The company

A converted potato barn in an equestrian centre in the heart of the Devon countryside might not seem the most likely location for an international printing operation. But this is exactly where Imprint Digital set up shop five years ago as the digital short-run printing arm of book and journal publishers Imprint Academic.

The company was originally founded solely to print Imprint’s output, but the team soon realised it would be profitable to print work for other publishers too. Today, Imprint Digital supplies mostly small self-publishers, but also Yale University Press, Souvenir Press and Summersdale publishers.

The situation
Imprint Digital never actually aimed to get into printing for export markets, reports customer services manager Derek Hall. Instead, this part of the business has grown organically.

"The export arm all started when one person in Northern Ireland came to us five years ago wanting a job done," reports Hall, explaining that, to Imprint’s surprise, importing digital print from the UK can be cheaper for Irish publishers due to Ireland’s relatively small printing industry and the less competitive pricing environment this created.

"That person was pleased with the job we did and spoke to friends in the Republic of Ireland," continues Hall. "The publishing community is very small there and it is really all about word of mouth. Now we have 12 regular clients in Ireland, and we also have four in France and a couple in Holland too."

This gradual growth into export markets is very much in keeping with the company’s overall ethos, explains Hall. "We don’t do any serious marketing within the UK or elsewhere, we employ no sales staff but, rather, rely on word-of-mouth recommendation and a strong Google ranking for business," he says.

Because the company has never needed to promote itself more aggressively, it can channel resources into catering most effectively for the quality and quick-turnaround demands of the jobs that do come
its way.

This is how Imprint can, despite not being the kind of sizeable set-up you might expect to be courting export work, deliver quick enough turnarounds to counteract delivery times to Ireland and Europe, explains Hall.

The method
The focus of the company is, then, on maintaining a very slick operation. In terms of the set-up at Imprint HQ, this translates into highly automated machines that allow the company’s compact workforce to multi-task.

"We have minimal manning, but that’s fine with the sort of machines we’ve invested in," explains Hall, referring to the company’s two Konica Minolta 2500Ps, a Konica Minolta c6501 colour press, a Xerox 700 colour press, two Horizon perfect binders, two Horizon HT-30 robotic 3-edge trimmers, a Europa laminator and a Polar 66 guillotine. "We have technology where you set something up and then walk away to another job," says Hall.

Also key is having technology backed up in case of downtime. "We have a back-up of pretty much every type of machine so if one goes down we can still lumber on," explains Hall.

Imprint also streamlines things at the pre-press end of things, only accepting jobs in print-ready PDF form. This can mean a little more hand-holding and tutoring when a client first starts working with Imprint, Hall warns, but it is worth it in the long run to keep the time taken between job submission and printing to an absolute minimum.

Of course no matter how quick off the mark Imprint is on the printing side of things, exporting overseas will necessarily always entail a two- or three-day time lag as the job is shipped, either by road, sea or air, depending on what the customer wants to pay for. This isn’t usually a problem for Imprint’s export customers, apart from when it comes to proofing.

"Most of the time we need to do a band proof, certainly for larger runs and on colour work," says Hall, "and that can be a problem for European clients because for them we tend to use air mail and that can take up to a week to get delivered, which is kind of crazy when you consider it can take less than a week to get a shipment of a production run delivered."

The solution for Imprint and its clients is to build close enough working relationships that proofing can often be skipped. "We do skip the proofing stage with a lot of the Irish customers when they don’t want to wait for a week," he says. "We can do that because they trust our printing and we trust their artwork."

Keeping the time lost on couriering to a minimum needs also to go hand in hand with keeping courier costs down, says Hall.

"We’ve been through quite a few different couriers, each with problems that needed ironing out to ensure an extremely competitive price," says Hall. "But we’re in a situation now where we have a very good courier at a very good price."

Using the same courier for UK deliveries as overseas should help a printer get a good price, says Hall. "The service is cheaper to us now because we’ve grown a bit and we’re now sending enough in the UK domestic shipments for our courier to give us a good price on European shipments," he says. "That makes a huge difference."

The result
Although Hall doesn’t see the export facet of the company ever becoming the main event, it is, at 5% of the business, a nice sideshow, he says.

The way Imprint is set up means that even when very-quick-turnaround jobs come in from overseas, it is usually not too tricky to re-jig the day’s rota. "We don’t tend to do any night shifts," reports Hall. "Adam, our print manager, might have to stay behind a couple of hours but because we have back up machines we’re usually able to prioritise the really important jobs without getting behind with anything else."

Quick turnarounds are necessarily built into Imprint’s way of working anyway because of the size of its facility, explains Hall. "If something comes in on Monday, we want it out by Friday at the latest simply because we are small and so if we have bits of paper floating around they get in the way," he says. "So we have to just keep pushing paper through the mill."

The verdict
Although not something Imprint would have ever anticipated demand for from such a modest set-up, business from export markets has come as a pleasant surprise to the company, says Hall.

But he would warn other small printers considering catering for overseas markets that they must ensure the terms of trading remain advantageous.

How to process payments is a key consideration. "We bend over backwards to help customers out on some things but there are some things we can’t do," says Hall. "One of them is going through the administration of converting euros or dollars – we haven’t got the resources for that."

Instead the company insists on charging all customers in pounds rather than euros, to avoid administration fees and ensure the company doesn’t fall foul of unfavourable exchange rates. Imprint is also careful to make sure overseas customers pay in advance of a job to avoid any difficulties in tracking payments.

Whether it continues to make good financial sense for these Irish, French and Dutch publishers to import books from the UK in the future remains to be seen.

When Imprint first started working with Irish publishers five years ago, the exchange rate of around €1.50 to the pound made Imprint very competitively priced compared to Irish or European printers. But of course this is not quite the situation today.

And so whether this type of work continues to come in to Imprint at a modest yet steady rate, remains to be seen, resting as it does with the highly unpredictable fate of the euro-zone.

What the example of Imprint Digital does demonstrate, is how a modest-sized printer might make exporting a success when overseas clients come knocking at the door.