Wide-format is a broad concept and experts say the magic of turning a dollar in it is finding your niche and excelling there. The options are many – POS signage, decorative and industrial applications, volume label printing and vehicle wraps. There’s the huge outdoor media sector, including street furniture (signage on bus shelters, stations, buses and so on) and billboards.
Printing writ large – it can be as diverse as a faux ceiling extension digitally printed on HP Wallpaper to match an original ceiling, such as All About Graphics provided for the School of Seven Bells restaurant on Melbourne’s Chapel Street. It can be direct-to-fabric aqueous printing, as at Visual Solutions in Melbourne. Or the one-stop shop, such as Sydney’s Look Print, where 30,000sq m of media is output each month in a variety of technologies, such as large-format photography, solvent, UV, roll-to-roll and flatbed printing, with board prep, mounting, finishing and laminating all handled inhouse.
The opportunities are endless and you can find yourself cross-quoting for projects you’d never imagined. If approached in the right way, the results can make a stunning difference to your bottom line.
A caveat, however. Succeeding in wide-format, let alone diversifying into the sector from other schools of printing, requires not only an investment in the technology, but in skilling your workforce, through recruiting and training. And even then, fortunes can waver.
Omnigraphics has used its tech edge to steer through uncertain times. Along with its Opus Group sibling Cactus Imaging, it was almost sold last year as Opus tried to reduce its $57m groupwide debt, and only a reconfigured bank deal kept the two companies under the Opus umbrella.
Nathan Sable, sales director at Omnigraphics, urges a conservative approach to wide-format opportunities. “Margins are forever slimming, so to be successful, it is imperative that printers are able to turn over large volumes. It requires technical expertise and constant education and investment with the most up-to-date machinery and equipment. Experienced staff are essential.”
But he is upbeat about the potential in outdoor advertising. “The outdoor industry as a whole has shown consistent growth. Skills such as pre-production, colour management and file management are essential in satisfying the demands of clients in this market.”
His bullishness is reinforced by the Outdoor Media Association (OMA), the peak national industry body representing most of Australia’s outdoor media display companies, production facilities and asset owners.
OMA CEO Charmaine Moldrich tells ProPrint that printing for the out-of-home medium is a specialty area requiring a quick turnaround and demanding high- quality standards. She says, “This is a challenging reality but those who get it right set themselves apart from the rest and raise the benchmark for the industry.
“Our members are seeing larger campaigns and better use of the medium as a whole, with a good spread across all outdoor formats. Advertisers are really taking advantage of the benefits of each format and are finding that multi-format campaigns are highly effective.
“A positive development in the industry is the heightened consultation with government, seeing our members contracted for highway hording or building wraps during periods of construction.”
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Sydneysider Andrew Bannerman, owner of Kwik Kopy Chatswood, wanted to break out of the 20c-per-copy A3 market, and identified wide-format as a new platform for success. There was increasing interest in it from existing commercial customers, with a steadily growing number of jobs going out to trade printers – so why not do it inhouse, was his rationale.
Bannerman and some staff colleagues completed an intensive course on media, which he says is the greatest challenge for commercial printers – understanding how vinyls behave on an endless variety of surfaces, and under the hot Aussie sun. He admits there’s a lot more project management involved, such as developing relationships with reputable installers. Organising contractors to sand and repaint walls might not be on your average Kwik Kopy printer’s to-do list, but whatever it takes to get the job done right. He has no problem sourcing and learning of new revenue streams as the market tightens up.
Then there’s bringing in the kit – after early work in pigment dye and a steady start in eco solvent with a rival supplier, Bannerman bought a VersaCamm VS640 with a mounter, cold laminator and cutter from Roland DG in 2012. The 1550mm roll printer has been a dynamic 24-hours-a-day workhorse. “The eco solvent was the best choice, as it allows us to use an online cutter rather than offline,” he says of the rapid drying characteristics of eco solvent. Next on the cards is a flatbed printer and taking on an even greater range of jobs.
Kwik Kopy Chatswood has done special-cut labels, vinyls, vehicle wraps, window decals, wallpaper, acrylics, frosted film and canvasses in the signage and POS markets. Customers are in food and beverage , music and finance. While the Chatswood outfit is a trailblazer, Bannerman acknowledges a trend within the Australian storefront printing sector to offer wide-format.
The upshot for Kwik Kopy Chatswood has been a climbing ratio of wide-format work with the commercial mix– from five up to 12 per cent in the past year – and that’s good news for Bannerman, as he estimates the invoice on a typical wide-format job is around $1,000, compared to $400 in the highly competitive production digital sphere.
He has not even marketed the wide-format service, with the work all coming from walk-ins and from asking existing customers for their wide-format requirements. While the bulk of the business is still digital document printing on its Canon C7000 and two Xeroxes, a J75 and 700, he looks forward to the day when wide-format reaches parity.
Bannerman began as an offset printer with the Kwik Kopy group 26 years ago. He and his brother Alastair later set up Kudu Printing in Chatswood, merging with the local Kwik Kopy in 2003, which the brothers soon acquired wholly. In 2011, Andrew bought out his brother’s stake, and today Kwik Kopy Chatswood is an outfit with six full-time staff carving out a name as a one-stop digital shop for commercial and wide-format /signage work, high-level graphic design and websites.
[Related: More Kwik Kopy news]
Harry Kontogiannis, who manages wide-format inkjet & commercial printing at Agfa, believes wide-format inkjet (WFIJ) makes an accessible entry point for commercial printers into the larger-format realm.
He says, “We feel that commercial printers are able to leverage the WFIJ technologies to their advantage. POP and POS advertising is on the increase and WFIJ is the perfect vehicle for this type of work. Investment in WFIJ hardware is not as high as heavy-metal press technology and retraining staff is easy. Supplemental products to commercial print are also possible, with the commercial printer able to bring much of this inhouse with WFIJ equipment.”
Printers are looking for integrated workflow solutions to improve file delivery and save time, says Kontogiannis. “The clients that have done this successfully have in many cases recognised a new revenue stream that supplements their commercial print offering. They create a separate sales team, and sometimes a separate division within their business.”
The hardware bill for kitting up to print wide-format can be quite reasonable, he argues. “Investment can be as low as $80,000 for a fully installed and functioning WFIJ system. A suitable environment is also required – air-conditioning, compressed air, broadband and similar services to the building. Operator training is included upon installation. Operators transition easily.”
Finishing equipment is also an important component, he adds, citing cutters, routers and laser engravers, to give full versatility to finishing options and provide a comprehensive inhouse service.
Letting the world know about your wide-format services and retraining sales staff is essential, he says. “The sales team will need to upsell this broader range of products, to include POS signage or textiles. Perhaps including a new webstore – such as Agfa StoreFront – to add to the marketing efforts would be advantageous.”
[Related: More wide format news]
JFP sees big picture
The trajectory into oversized formats taken by iconic Sydney printer John Fisher Printing (JFP) has been from the quality offset market, which remains its core. Today the company provides retail, pharmaceutical, publishing and agency work, as well as promotional material and direct marketing (with VDP), down to managing fulfilment and distribution.
Half a decade ago, JFP embarked on a move into wide-format print to cater to a wider range of its existing customers’ requirements, including banners, wraps and posters for the POS and outdoor signage markets, says Tony Fisher, a JFP director.
The fourth-generation printing company, founded by Tony’s grandfather John Fisher 63 years ago and run for many years by his son, well known industry personality John N Fisher, moved to 2,200sqm premises at Marrickville, with Tony in sales and marketing, his brother John a litho operator, and cousin, Toby Friend, as a director, managing the operations of a loyal and experienced production team.
In addition to its offset printing, JFP offers an array of wide-format display work for interior and exterior displays, including small-run specialty boxes, corflutes, backlits, posters and banners up to 3.2m wide, re-positionable window decals and wall fabrics, direct-print-to-floor graphics, street signage and one-way vision.
“We were outsourcing a growing quantity of wide-format work to the trade and wanted to bring it in-house, to be able to print beyond the A1+ format of our offset machines. We researched the wide-format inkjet market for around six years and noticed the breakthroughs in speed and quality were quite dramatic,” Fisher tells ProPrint.
Both factors were a must for JFP, and the company invested in its first Vutek, a GS3200 hybrid roll/flatbed UV, with the hardware from EFI and the prepress, including colour calibration, from DES. It has since ordered a LED-curing Vutek GS3250LX, which enables printing on lined corrugated boards. Both are eight-colour machines with an opaque white capability. In flatbed mode, the GS3200 and GS3250LX can print on up to 50mm-gauge, which opens up new opportunities for JFP – such as printing on MDF, melamine benchtops, doors and x-board product.
“The GS3250LX gives us the ability to print to corrugated boxes, films as thin as a human hair, to reflective mirror, rubber matting, as well as wood veneer products, floor and wall covering, safety signage and, yes, we can even print to bubble wrap! The possibilities and applications are exciting,” says Fisher.
The two Vuteks complement JFP’s offset line up, a five-colour A1 Mitsubishi with inline aqueous coating, a half-size Heidelberg Speedmaster, a two-colour SM52, a Cylinder, diecutting and a Polar cutting line.
“Our digital press operator was trained up for the Vuteks, so there was not much of a learning curve, but any prepress personnel can adapt their existing skills and with a little training, wide-format printing can easily be added to their skill set,” Fisher says.
He estimates that 75 per cent of JFP’s wide-format work is ordered by existing litho customers. “We are also undertaking a marketing campaign to expose our expanded services in visual graphic displays and to make old and new customers aware of the company’s unique and growing capabilities.”
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