Producing True Works of Art

Wood Huntley got the idea for Museum Store Products in 1978, when a friend who worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art asked if he could help her find a way to produce a magnet to sell museum visitors. Huntley agreed to help, and found a photography studio in Brooklyn that could reproduce the image for the magnet with the best color match possible.

Huntley recognized there was a viable business opportunity to provide custom products for museum visitors who want to take their museum experience and memories home. Today, Museum Store Products provides a wide variety of items to the company’s customers, which includes the Smithsonian, The National Gallery of Art, and The Guggenheim.

Challenge

Museum Store Products initially purchased two digital color copiers. While this allowed the company to expand its product line to include matted color prints, color consistency and quality were ongoing problems.

“We could print something in the morning and, if we needed to reprint part of it just an hour later, the color would not come out the same,” says Huntley. “We were color correcting almost everything. You can imagine when you have to reproduce a recognized masterpiece, color is critical.”

After the installation of a RICOH (Booth 2022) Pro C900 digital press, those issues were addressed, and the business continued to grow. Museum Store Products also began to see new opportunities for product development. Ricoh representatives kept in close touch with Museum Store Products decision makers, including Huntley and his graphic manager, Shane Butts. Huntley and Butts wanted to stay on the cutting edge of color capabilities and application variety as their business grew.

Solution

When the RICOH Pro C7100SX became available, the Ricoh team was sure to introduce the new technology to Museum Store Products. The device was part of a new series of multifunction color production systems designed to reproduce colors with incredible accuracy and near-offset quality, creating images with up to 1,200x4,800 dpi resolution.

The device’s color gamut, 80 ppm speeds, and ability to handle substrates like synthetics and heavier paper have made it possible for Museum Store Products to deliver on its plan to expand its product line extensively, including adding the ability to print postcards of various sizes, and use white or clear toner to create new effects, such as spot gloss. The addition of a Duplo (Booth 1225) paper cutter made postcard production even more seamless.

Results

With the capabilities of the Pro C7100SX, Museum Store Products has been able to grow its product portfolio and its revenue.

Exceptional color consistency is the biggest advantage the Pro C7100SX delivers, paying dividends in reduced production costs and enhanced reputation. Butts likes that users can change toner adhesion to adapt to the different paper stocks, so they always have accurate brightness and clarity, and the toner density is continually checked and adjusted to ensure color consistency.

“When you are reproducing images from artists like Renoir, Matisse, or Monet, they have to look exactly like the original. The Pro C7100SX makes it possible to replicate these masterpieces with accurate color matching, which has really defined our business,” says Butts. “The best part is once we get a color match approved by the client, we can take that color and put it on different products and it stays consistent. We don’t have to keep making constant adjustments like we used to do prior to our relationship with Ricoh.”