To succeed in today’s competitive wholesale business to business printing industry, you have to stay relevant. To do that, you need to find a niche that fits your equipment and your particular skillset.
John’s Studio Wholesale has been in business since 1990. The Batavia, N.Y.-based company started out in the wholesale screen printing industry, printing lawn signs and vinyl banners for other sign shops. At the time, small print shops didn’t have vinyl cutting technology or screen printing technology, so John’s Studio began offering it to them.
“My dad John, who started doing that, he was always of the mindset that if you have a product, you have to find a way to sell it outside your local area. He got that idea as a manufacturer to retailers. We’ve been doing it ever since, actually, but obviously the business has changed,” says Michael Hodgins, owner and president of John’s Studio Wholesale.
The screen printing sector has diminished a bit but the company found another niche where there is still a good price point, in thermography. This process places a resinous powder on a wet printed image, which is then fused with heat or infrared radiation to create a raised impression on the paper. It is in large demand for fancy letterhead and stationery as well as invitations and business cards.
“For us it is not about the next generation technology, it is about serving particular niches and needs within our client base,” Hodgins says. Since adding thermography to its repertoire, the company has been able to sell more products to its existing customers.
John’s Studio Wholesale sells to print shops, sign shops, print brokers and advertising agencies; anyone who sells to the end user.
When the company started using wide-format digital printers, a lot of print shops didn’t have that technology, but now, the digital printing business has become less of a share of the company’s sales. The big reason for that is the company’s clients began purchasing the technology when prices went down so that service isn’t as much in demand as it once was.
“The more specialized the product, the better fit it is for us,” he says. That’s why screen printing and offset thermography are a prime focus. “We’re trying to do things a little bit unique and off the beaten path a bit.”
The process of screen printing hasn’t changed but everything around it has, Hodgins says. The prepress technology and how people communicate with the shop and place orders has changed rapidly in the past few years.
“Those parts of the transaction are evolving faster than the printing process,” he says.
The company, like many wholesale B2B companies, is online and sells nationwide. Because of shipping times, its market tends to be east of the Mississippi and north of the Carolinas.
“In the bigger context of the industry, the reality of time and shipping costs still make it somewhat of a regional business,” Hodgins says.
Wes Faulkner, owner at PC Signs & Graphics in Garner, N.C., says that there is more wholesale competition now because there is a lot of used printers on the market that offer quality and speed at a fraction of what it costs to buy new equipment.
Many have gotten into the business because of the lure of easy money, he adds.
He points out that someone can get into the billboard printing market for about $12,000 for a 5-meter solvent printer.
“The assumption is that wholesale is easier than retail, which isn’t necessarily the case when dealing with sign companies,” Faulkner says.
Part of the problem is that small shops aren’t as familiar as they should be with the printers and the size of files that need to be sent over for a quality print.
“They assume a banner is a banner, and there’s technically 30 different types of banner you could choose from for a specific situation,” he says.
Many wholesalers turn into retail companies because they realize how much more they can charge, he says, but once they get into it they realize it is a lot more work than they expected.
“When you are wholesale, you get a print-ready file. You don’t realize the hours it has taken to get to that stage of the file. They just assume the customer has that file but on the retail level, they never have the file,” he says.
PC Signs & Graphics tries to work on quality first. It wants to make sure everything goes out looking great.
“That’s something that not everybody pays attention to and sort of the excuse when they are called out on it,” Faulkner says. They say you get what you pay for.
“We focus on quality, which can add some value, so we don’t have to compete solely on price,” he says. “Pricing is always a concern but there are people who will pay more for quality than treating it as a commodity with no service or quality attached.”
Longmont, Colo.-based Circle Graphics Inc. entered the wholesale printing market in 2000. Back then the company saw an opportunity to leverage some new emerging digital printing technologies to do things a little differently.
Initially the company focused on the billboard market, entering that market “pretty disruptively at about 50 percent of market price, which catches people’s attention, including our competitors who back then told their customers, and tried to tell themselves, you don’t make money selling billboards at those prices and Circle Graphics is going to go out of business,” says Andrew Cousin, CEO of Circle Graphics Inc.
The company now prints about 60 percent of all billboards in the United States.
“The issue with that kind of market share is that you run out of market,” he says. So back in 2011, the company entered a new business segment printing and manufacturing customized or personalized wall décor, primarily canvas gallery wraps.
Cousin is proud that Circle Graphics entered this market pretty disruptively as well and over the last five years has grown so rapidly that its canvas business is larger than its billboard business.
Wholesale business to business printing is not easy, Cousin says. “Printing in general is a highly competitive business. We only enter a market or go after a market segment if we think we can be differentiated in what we do and, for us, differentiation usually means having the lowest cost space.”
One of the ways the company has brought costs down is by developing its own ink formulas. So, instead of having to pay $80 to $100 per liter, it formulates inks for less than $10 per liter.
It also developed better technology for putting up billboards. It developed a single sheet polyethylene poster system with a cable and pulley mounting system. Billboard companies have retrofitted to use this system instead of having to do the wallpapering method that was used in the past.
“It makes it much easier for one person to change out a billboard,” he says.
Cousin’s advice to individuals wanting to get into this market is differentiate yourself.
“Unless you really feel you can find a way to do it better, cheaper or faster, you’re going to be an also ran in the marketplace,” he says. If a company can do any of those three things, it has an opportunity to gain traction in the industry.
Circle Graphics has 88 grand-format printers across five locations. It operates 400,000 square feet of manufacturing facilities with 800 employees. It prints about 350 million square feet of production a year.
Erik Baker, vice president of sales at ImagineThis in Massillon, Ohio, says that customers are always looking for the best price, but they still want the best quality.
“That’s what we are very good at,” he says. “It is a very fast-paced industry. Very fun. You never know what is coming up,” he says.
It targets any large-format sign shop that needs to sub out some work because it can’t handle the job in-house.
ImagineThis has an online store that includes prices. Nobody has to wait for a price quote and there are customer service representatives available if someone needs help ordering.
“It is very competitive. Basically what it comes down to is what our customers are demanding and that we are there to help them out. We have the best price and best turnaround time. There’s a lot of competitors out there just like us. We want to do the best job so they keep coming back,” Baker says.
The company also prints a lot of yard signs, banners, mesh and adhesive-backed graphics.