Very new to the printing world!

[carl-robin]

Hello everyone, my name is Jonny and myself and my wife run our own promotional and graphic design company here in Minneapolis, MN on the side to working our regular full-time day jobs. We currently do promotional events, parties and event planning and do all of our own graphics and design for them as well as jobs for other people in the Minneapolis area. We design brochures, 4x6 club flyers, business cards, restuarant menues, cd covers and pretty much anything else our customers want/need! Basically what we want to do is turn our company into our fulltime job and one thing we want to start with is doing our own printing! So if anyone out there could lend me some knowledge and help us out by giving us your expertise and your suggestions (what kind of printer would be best to purchase, start up costs for this, paper wholesalers, etc) we would GREATLY appreciate it!! Thank you very much and hope to hear from some of you printing experts soon!

 

[PDeuth]

One word of advice: Don't. If you are talented designers do what you do best. Diluting your strengths by taking on such an enormous task won't help your business. Are you using local printers now? What format are they using: offset/lithography; flexography; digital; gravure; or screen? I assume they're using offset/litho. Your costs to get into that will be in the tens of thousands. What you will get for less than $100 thousand are equipment and technologies incapable of doing good work. You will not be able to economically justify such an investment unless you use this equipment 40 hours + a week. Do you want to devote that amount of time to running the printing business?
Then there's the learning curve. Poke around this forum and see if you can understand what folks are talking about. If you cannot, then take that as a sign that you might be in over your head. My advice is to find a printer with whom you can partner. If you can find a small, local printer and form a strategic partnership with that printer, maybe they'll let you work with them in production so you can get your feet wet. Meanwhile, get some books and read them. GAIN.net has a bookstore, or merely search Amazon. Good luck!

 

[oxburger]

I agree, you don't want to take on the chore of the actual printing. That's a whole can of worms it would be easier to stay away from. There are plenty of online printers as well who specialize in smaller items (brochures, postcards, letterhead, business cards and the like) who can do it far cheaper than it would be to start a printshop from scratch. Since they specialize, they can offer reduced costs that they pass on to you and I'm sure it may even be cheaper if you talk them into being your sole printer and let them handle all of it.

 

[JaimeZ]

Carl-robbin

I admire your forward thinking and to address your situation, I would take a three phase approach:

First, continue to use a local printer (one with offset and digital capablilites) for the real custom jobs; you may also want to look for a local binder and if there are any still around a service bureau for some of the more difficult prepress stuff (unless the local printer has a great prepress dept.)

Second, use online printers for the commodity stuff 4/0 and 4/0 UV coated 8.5x11 flyiers/brochures, business cards, postcards etc.--keeping in mind that they will not be consistent on exact reorders like a local printer will be.

Third, with some volume look at a lower end digital printer and grow that part of the business--eventually getting more robust digital equipment over time--it seems that small shops are heading in this direction.

As for getting offset equipment yourself, take heed to the last two posts--offset printing takes years of 40 hour a week practice to begin to get it right.

A good solution would be to find an established local offset printer for sale with sales over $200,000 and keep the pressman (and learn about offset printing as quickly as you can so the pressman does not hold you hostage) and then develop the digital end of it.

As long as you and your wife will be involved I think you can make it work.

 

[MarketMaven]

Can't give you any more advice than you received above but wanted to wish you luck in your business venture.