State Of The Printing Industry.

Thanks Inky,
I enjoyed my time while it lasted, but I'm too old to be taught new processes. The money isn't there either anymore, stuck for years on the same old wage scale, while the cost of living has gone up significantly. I have won several awards for "best piece of printing" in the 1990's and I have done many 6 over 6 colour jobs on a two colour press. I was proud of my achievements, so was the company I worked for. This can happen to all of us. Stay put is my advise. I have changed one company too much, and lost my chair when the music stopped.

 

Everything I have read in this thread is so head on, I learned on the job 4 years ago, with a ab dick 9840. I fell in love with this trade, and yes it is still a trade. I use a camera to shoot negs, I strip negs, I use a flip top plate burner and I hand develop my plates! I know I cannot match the prices of digital print but I stress quality to my customers along with flexiblity. Your customers should want face to face interaction with there print provider it let's the printer know exactly what they are looking for in their job. Personal touch is the only reason my shop is still competing with the digital shop across town. This is why most don't consider it a trade anymore cuz these digital shops got guys who just sit at a computer and hits print

 

Ziggy, I completely agree with you that customers will come for the quality. Some customers just want budget xerocrap, but others want hand crafted quality, and the flexibility that offset offers, like metallics, spots, varnishes, things digital can only dream of. I started out with negs too, but I was lucky enough to have an old Lino imagesetter.


In the Walmart consumer driven economy of today most people care about quantity over quality. Let the other shops cut their bottom lines and margins to get them. Look for the good, quality customers who will come back year after year.

 

Unfortunately I feel as though things are just going to go downhill as the years go by. Everything is becoming more and more digital. Plus as graficworx said, people now want quantity over quality and as such are just going to lean more towards digital.

 

What puzzles me is that though its been around for years digital is still quite expensive. Unfortunately we have to embrace new technologies and evolve with them sometimes at the expense of some traditional printing techniques.

 

So I just started in the industry in 2008 , not as a printer but as an ink guy. I started in shipping and noticed a downward trend in the conventional side of ink. But a big uptick in the UV side of things. Later moved on to the small batch side of things (1-60lbs color matches) I don't know much other then what I have seen, but everything right now is everyone wants it yesterday and cheaper. And cheaper does not mean better. We run our shop off of quality and customer service.

Quality and the willingness to do things that pressmen and their customers want has led to an surge in business for us. I see more shops coming and asking can you do this. But we have also taken a hit from "well so and so sells it cheaper" and that has led us to lose some customers.

People are starting noticing most things from China are crap and wanting something better.That cheaper is not always better. I think that will eventually lead to a higher quality of things. Any shop that can survive these hard times I think will start to see more business and larger profit margins.

I do not think digital is going to replace everything. But it will take away a lot of the small stuff. Then again I have a big base of letterpress guys saying business is booming. That people are requesting that unique look that they can get with a letterpress.

Everything is evolving and as an industry we have to evolve as well.

But that is just my 2cents

 

Just keep on pointing out your top quality work at a reasonable speed might not be next day but I know my customers will wait three days to get a crisp clean beautiful product worth every penny

 

I agree to. Printing is slowing down. The trend nowadays is online advertising and publications. That means of course less work from the printed advertisement side. HOWEVER, I think instead of simply dying out. The industry itself will shift. See this interesting article: http://smallbusiness.printplace.com/2012/10/13/print-and-advertising-where-its-headed/ . From there, I am thinking that the printing industry will be more niche oriented. With prints being considered a special kind of material or marketing item. This means working WITH the changing times, rather than promoting the old standard. So instead of the flyer or newspaper being the primary medium for certain marketing goals, they then become a special support for online marketing, giving it an essential physical boost.

 

I went to Graphic Expo in Chicago this year and the spotlight was on digital presses like Indigo. Last time I went to the show was 18 years ago and the whole first floor was all conventional presses, Heidelberg and Komori took up the bulk of the first floor, but this year I had to weave my way through HP, Cannon, Xerox ect. just to find Heidelberg Conventional printing is a dying art but it wont go away entirely.

 

when i started in printing in 1992 it was a great trade. i could see my self doing this the rest of my life. if you quit or lost your job, it seemed like you could have a new gig by the end of the day. i was laid off in 2009 and have not been able to land a full time job doinf offset printing since. i now do flexo full time and offset on the weekend helping out at places. i see no future in it now. i love printing but i believe its time to do something else. oh ya, i hate flexo

 

Offset printing is slowing down. As run length dwindles
What pisses me off is the digital printing replacing it is crap, does not look as good, causing issues in the bindery.
What ever rolls off a digital press is accepted, miss register, colour shift etc.. If it was printed offset with that issue the manager is harping down your neck.

As an offset printer I trialled a new ink which gave 20 - 30 minute timeframes heavy coverage on silk stocks could be cut & folded. gloss stocks 10 - 15 mins. trying to get the short run quick turn around work back to offset.
It failed as the managers were too cought up in the traditional 1 day turn around, not wanting to upset the offset workflow for rushed jobs. Only to see it printed digital looking crap. So I gave up.

It's a shame as we had a job that proved its worth, a late order on 130gsm silk heavy coverage to be printed, cut & folded delivered prior to 10.30am too large for digital and I was asked to stay back and do overtime. I said no need, I can print it 8.30am in the morning and you can have it shipped by 10 am...

Job done, 8.30am start full 350% black bleed areas on silk without coating , cut folded and dispatched prior to 10am. Managers are in aw of this, yet still fail to push rushed jobs to offset..

Digital = cheap, nasty, quick turn around.
Offset = charge like a wounded bull for plates, hike up the prices, high quality & can be a quick turnaround now.

If you compare the cost of constant mechanical issues with digital presses & the need for consistent upgrading, combined with the bindery issues through static or the slippery nature of digital print & the slow running speeds. Offset presents itself as a bargain....
Just stop charging out a $4.00 plate at $50 - $75 and it will look comparable to digital charges.
Keep your offset presses in a good running condition and the work can be smashed through...

Digital press has a fault = technician in straight away to fix it...
Offset press has a fault = deal with it and work around it unless the press cant turn over at all..

 

I have been an offset printing press operator for 20 years, every time I see someone with a low quality crappy business card they made on their home computer I am a sad panda

 

Some of the big digital printers are impressive and of course far better than your typical home printer, however, looking under a magnifying glass the difference in sharpness is impeccable from litho offset machines in comparison plus it feels like there's more of an art to it.

 

Printing is not a good industry to be in, my friends that did other trades are well and truly better off. They comand high rates of pay, are always in demand and never undercut by chinga's.

4 years ago my hourly rate was 60% higher. That's when I was in offset, now I'm a monkey feeding a large format digital press.

 

The same all over the world..

Good thread.. Altough i´m in a different economic reallity, printing industry is heading the same way...

Through the past years, printing (offset) became more and more a commodity.

Skills were replaced with tech, and tech is always in the cutting-price race.. so, the same job that was taken to a reliable printer, now is given to the cheaper copyshop printer (who purchased a 4 c press and is happy to charge the same rate he does with a photocopy, but in a quarter million dollar press)
In this scenario, offset printing look up for subsistence, and gang run printers are the starlet of this age.
My experience... I had a printing shop with several pressmen and two colors presses, but broker printers got better costs than myself... WITH NO STRUCTURE!!, no press, no employees, no plants.. just a office and a laptop (and a printing shop owner willing to sell his work at no logic charge)
So, the path was clear, to re-born or die.. less people, less equipment, higher productivity and lower prices.. That´s where we are now.

Digital is a complement, no competition... A printing shop invest, at least, 100K in hardware.. Digital presses (bah.. color copiers, let´s name them proper!) are 20 -60K U$D. So, instead buying a new press, we spend in a color copier.. The bussiness is: 3 hours turnaround for a client brochure that in offset worth 4K U$S for 2K U$S, but leaving 60% of that for the copier provider..

My 10 cents belief...
We are what we are.. we are printers.. we like hardware.. larger and faster presses, we like the challenge of deadlines for a 42 pages catalog.. We do digital as last resource... Born printer, died printer...
(in the middle of that, we can be -for a while- copiers...)

So, yes, globe around, there will be less printing shops... but bigger ones.. more "holistic graphic solutions shops", but the carriers of the proudly ink in the veins traditions are the ones who don´t give up. The ones who has a really costly pressman who KNOWS how to do the work, and the kind of people who gather in a company bbque and comment about "how we solve the XX Company Report" in 3 hours from desing to shipment... IN OUR OFFSET PRESS!!

(Just my truth, no THE truth..)

 

I'm a Pressman (sheet fed), printing used to be a respectable trade. Yes William the job is harder, from crap materials all the way to the people in the office that think anyone off the street can do our jobs as good as us craftsmen. And they wonder why we drink...

 

lol that was the lead pressman i worked with for a while daily quote. and that was back in the 90's

 

For me the industry reflects society, going more into electronic communication than the written word with the inevitable reduction in the size and relevance of printing. I don't think there will be a paperless world in my lifetime and there will always be a need for packaging print.
Our industry was slow to change and embrace new technology despite the warnings. A certain dogma prevailed in the 80's and 90's where many in the industry felt they were bullet proof, well a lot of them have been shot down. Back then it was accepted to rip customers off with massive profit margins and poor efficiency. This allowed the rise of the 'print broker' who said he could get it done cheaper. He did by playing printers off against each other and using thier innefficiency and laziness against them.
In the UK in this era Thatcher recognised that 2 industries held the main power, mining and printing (Fleet Street) so she set out to destroy the unions and succeded. Thatcher wasn't right in my opinion but the unions had it coming to a degree with their opposition to new technology and dogmatic political viewpoint. They certainly didn't represent me, neither did Thatcher. Consequently we went to an industry with no teeth where big companies hoovered up all the competition and devalued wages and conditions in the interests of 'shareholder value'.
Digital will continue to make inroads into traditional printing but the high costs will mean less employed people on less and less money, hey, the 20% who have 80% of the wealth have to keep it right?
As I said I think our industry reflects society and this is the real worry. Everything brought down to the lowest common denominator, less and less people employed with conditions worsening every year. No redress to situations that are wrong or unfair, a get on with it on my terms or get lost and I'll get someone who will.
The industry missed the boat and now we have the industry we deserve because we let them do it, hope we are better as a society.

YG

 

Some of you guys have it all wrong.

We are an all digital company and we're looking to move into offset in the next year.

I believe one problem here is age and loss of perspective. When you are young you are on the bleeding edge but as you grow older you lose the energy and frankly the interest of always being on the bleeding edge.

First of all, all the people that are saying "print is dead". Sure, newspapers, books and magazines will become less and less but even if you only printed those, the amount of stuff that's printed is so enormous that you can never hope to saturate the demand. This is more of a sales, marketing and business issue than it is one of the print industry. You have to keep up with what clients want and keep fighting for new clients.

We are mainly in the wide format industry and if you think that you are being undercut in prices, you have seen nothing yet. Recently we were bidding on a job and a competitor offered $15 for a 12.5 sqm billboard printed on Blue backed paper. $15 for the whole thing (without application). That's suicide.

BUT our clients stay with us because they can never get what we do anywhere else. We have the best designers around, when they have to deal with some price cutter they'll tell them "eh, we don't do design". When they come to us we will handle EVERYTHING, from their banners, car wraps, billboards, business cards, posters, flyers, labels to 10 meter signs, wallpapers, wall scapes and pretty much anything else they can think of. So our market are businesses who want a hustle free experience. We have realistic prices with them, if they come to us and say "this guy is offering to do the print for half" and then we explain to them the whole thing, of what's going to happen and so on. One such occasion an acquaintance wanted us to do a print for him, we made the design and proposed a price, he told us "this guy is doing it for almost half" we told him to go ahead. A few months after he comes back says it is terrible, he spent several thousand on the job and that he's going to kill the guy who did it. Then we re-did the job properly. This happens 99% of the time. Just by doing the jobs that our competition screwed up we have more work than we can handle.

The reason we're getting into offset is the same. The local print companies **** us up every time. One of our clients is a beverage company, they needed labels urgently and we ordered them at a local print house that we work with frequently. Not only did they push through the deadline several times once the labels arrived the color wasn't even in the same ballpark as what we wanted. Same goes for posters, flyers and pretty much anything else we ever did with them. Delays, broken deadlines and just bad work. The only print house that is competent to keep up with our demands and always does it in a timely manner is several hundred kilometers from us. We do a lot of work with them but it's a logistical problem, they finish the job really quickly but arranging the transport takes time and also shows on the price.

So basically for smaller runs we are forced to work with these incompetent ****** and we are just embarrassing ourselves in front of our clients.

Print isn't' going anywhere, any time soon. At least not in our lifetimes. Labels, posters, billboards, banners and pretty much any other short term advertising material is gonna remain in print form for the foreseeable future. So if it isn't an issue of industry it must be an issue of business. Sure it's gotten harder in the last 5 or so years but so what ? If you simply don't have the energy anymore to keep up with it, hire people who are young, smart and hungry and surround yourself with them.

It's a dog eat dog world.

 

We are the last shop standing out of 8 print shops in my town. Another local shop closed 2 weeks ago...you would think we would get at least one walk in-------nadda, nothing not evan a tele call!!
What I have seen grow is short run(5k and less) full color env. with mail merge letter!