It’s not uncommon for one of our clients to ask exactly what we do in our capacity as “print brokers.”  The immediate visual is of someone taking a print job and reselling it on the open market. But that’s far from the case. In actuality, it means that we serve as the intermediary between a client that needs something printed and the various vendors that will produce the finished product. And the printed product can be anything from business cards and NCR forms to complex booklets and brochures.

The next question is invariably why companies (our clients) just don’t do this themselves. That’s actually an easy question to answer and there are many reasons why our services are called upon. First and foremost is expertise. Most companies do not generate a constant stream of material that requires printing. Print has taken a back seat to electronic and online communication. And, while there are a multitude of talented individuals and companies that can handle those tasks, there are fewer and fewer people around that understand the complexities of the print process. I’ll save that for a later post, but it suffices to say that there are many different printing formats, applications, papers, and post press processes and it’s not a subject that many folks are familiar and comfortable with.

It follows that if you don’t fully understand the complexities of your print job, you’re also going to have a hard time determining which printer is qualified to undertake your project. Not only that, most large commercial printers will not undertake a job submitted by the end user. More often than not, the client ends up submitting files that have not been properly prepared and it becomes a time-consuming process to make the job “print ready.”

There’s also the “business relationship” issue. Printers would much rather receive files from a broker that has already evaluated their suitability and deal with a party with whom they have already established payment and credit terms. And for that matter, since we receive “wholesale” pricing, it really doesn’t cost the client any more to utilize our services than if they were able to find a printer that would undertake their project directly.

Recently we undertook a project on behalf of a large out of state client. The job consisted of printing a 16 page booklet with a “spot” metallic color on the inside and outside of the front and back covers; printing and inserting a full color flyer within the booklet, and arranging for the mailing of the booklet to several thousand addresses. The end results were dramatic.

Our job was to verify that the submitted files were “print ready” (in this case there were several missing fonts and links that we needed to fix), select a qualified printer (not every printer can do spot metallic colors), choose and deliver the printed brochures and flyers to a post-press facility that could undertake the insertion task, and then deliver the finished product to a qualified mail house that could ink-jet the addresses, tab the booklets closed, and submit the job to the post office for delivery. The client had the peace of mind that we would shepherd the job through the various stages of production and the recipients of the booklet received a top quality product in a timely manner.

In the end, we were able to select a printer and mailing house that could meet the qualifications of the job. Since we had a sample of the booklet that the client had printed previously elsewhere, we were able to compare the quality of the new print job against that of the old one. The enhancements were obvious in terms of resolution, color balance, and metallic spot color application. The images were crisp, the color was rich, and the overall quality of the mailing was enhanced considerably. For companies that choose to print (rather than send files digitally), the quality of the print piece matters. It is an extension of the client’s reputation and we were pleased to put our expertise to use.