Brisbane printer PS Creative is growing rapidly since it insourced its print production and found a niche in white ink digital printing.

Phil Sargeson, owner of the one-man operation in the city’s south east, says sales have grown 50 per cent since he installed an Oki C941 last February and became an early adopter of the technology.

“The thing that stuck out to me was the ability to print with white and clear toner, I did my research and found most printers couldn’t do that. So I knew we had to jump on it and start printing white,” he says.

PS Creative now prints business cards, greeting cards and swing tags to menus, wedding and event stationery on specialist stock like Buffalo, and offers trade rates to designers, letterpress studio, and agencies – work from which has doubled in a year.

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Sargeson had designed his products and outsourced production to trade printers since starting his business in early 2013, but because his runs were so short it made sense to do it himself.

“I was looking to print in-house rather than using trade printers, as the work I was doing was small quantities, so we started researching digital printers,” he says.

He says ganging jobs on the C941’s SRA3 print size has tripled the value of every job. He can also print doubled sided on Buffalo and use specialty stocks to add value to his work.

Because the ability to economically print white ink was so new, few printers were doing it and clients did not even know it was possible, making pricing and marketing challenging.

“From the first day we pumped out samples to show everyone, it was quite a learning curve on how to setup the artwork to print and how to price it – as there were no comparisons or anyone we could find doing the same thing,” he says.

“Not long after we started contacting letterpress studios, designers and wedding stationery designers to offer trade pricing to print for them. We started with a small handful back then, which took a few months to get momentum.”

Sargeson spent last year refining the technology and learning how to effectively market it, and now this year work is flooding in from referrals to the point where he plans to hire staff in the near future to keep up with demand.

“I found a niche market and basically had to start from scratch – printing samples, learning the process to print in white ink and ringing up everyone to sell this new printing technique. Capturing this market and making it our own has been ongoing,” he says.

Sargeson says Instagram has been a particularly good marketing medium, showing off work and new specialist paper stocks. He says referrals from it have doubled this year.

Paper merchants Spicers and KW Doggett also show his work to their customers as examples of what is possible on their paper.

Specialist ink is an increasingly popular option for printers looking to add value, with many digital printers released in the past year including a white or clear slot, and the new Fuji Xerox Color 1000i Press coming with metallic silver or gold.

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