Inking Outside the Box

If you’re a sign shop or large format business, you won’t be averse to the idea of driving increased profit, right? In which case, there’s a couple of things you can do to achieve this. Either you roll up your sleeves, aggressively promote your existing service capabilities to your audience and hopefully take market share from your competition – or you can mix things up and offer something different, hopefully enabling you to charge a premium in the process.

Of course, your best bet is to do both of the above. But let’s assume you’re already on it when it comes to the former option and concentrate on the latter. Regardless of the sign and display applications you might be undertaking, the goal with any is clearly to ensure that your customer captures the attention of their end-user audience. That means grabbing their gaze for those few vital seconds and drawing them in. If you have the right equipment, achieving this can often be a lot easier, quicker and less expensive than you – and your customers - might realize.

Take for example the fairly straightforward addition of a clear UV coating that can be applied to a standard retail POS/POS display or poster to give a matt or high gloss finish. Aside from delivering a more premium-level and up-market appearance to the piece, it instantly and quite literally becomes more eye-catching once the light hits it. And the likelihood of customers noticing it increases several-fold.

Bobby Fosson.

Another example is the addition of textures. I increasingly see this on specific signage, but an opportunity also lies in decorative products or promotional objects, such as a bag or fabric item. Rather than simply printing something to it, with the right software you can produce the texture of the actual line count or the thread count, thereby giving a true tactile feel to the product.   

Better yet, since you’re already putting together an estimate or quote for approval of the layout and production of the job, you can easily add a simple check box to say, "add spot UV" or "add texture." Do this and have some pre-printed samples to hand, and you’re halfway there to being able to up the value – and the price – of the job.  

Making this process even more trouble-free is the level of sophistication that exists within certain sign software solutions. Some all-in-one packages let you manage everything – from artwork design, to the addition of UV varnish or textures, to the direct output on the printing device. This eliminates having to contend with different packages that add time and headache to the job.

As always, the opportunities are aplenty for those who think a little differently in this industry and can demonstrate added-value to their customers.