Wider Formats, Larger Margins

The evolutionary story of Spartan Printing, Inc. may sound familiar: a 52-year-old firm that has morphed with technology and changed with the times. Situated in Arlington, TX, between Dallas and Fort Worth, Spartan Printing’s roots were in blueprints as the company got its start in 1963. When the Trebilcock family purchased Spartan in 1985, eight employees were still turning out a lot of blueprint work in an 8,500-square-foot facility.

However, its flagship business began dying off at a rate of about 10 percent per year, recalled Vince Trebilcock, now a VP at the firm. Spartan diversified, first with a one-color AB Dick press, Trebilcock said; then a half-sheet press was added, eventually followed by two 40-inch sheetfed presses in the mid-1990s. A Bobst diecutter also was installed, as was an HP Indigo digital press six years ago.

Today, Spartan has 52 full-time employees operating within a 54,000-square-foot plant, which was expanded by about one-fourth last December. Significantly, it has become a trade-only printer. Approximately 70 percent of its customers are print brokers, Trebilcock reported, adding that printers comprise another 25 percent or so of its customer base, followed by advertising agencies (5 percent).

When it comes to acquiring new equipment, “we try to buy something new every two years or so,” he said. Fourteen months ago, in January 2014, the firm purchased a two-meter EFI VUTEk QS2 Pro along with a Kongsberg (Esko) cutting table. “They were a package deal from xpedx,” Trebilcock explained. By the time he attended the Specialty Graphic Imaging Association (SGIA) Expo in late 2013, Trebilcock and his colleagues had narrowed down their choices to two or three wide-format devices, he recalled. (The 2015 edition of the SGIA show will be held in Atlanta, Nov. 4-6: www.sgia.org.)

“We had not one dollar of business,” he noted, “but we had polled our brokers.” The demand for wide-format print was there in northeast Texas and in the southwest U.S. in general – and it was growing. When it came to selecting the VUTEk UV model, versatility was the key, Trebilcock added, “since we didn’t [yet] know what we were going to print.” What they did know was that they didn’t need super-fast output because they didn’t have high volumes of work. Trebilcock learned that money buys more speed in the wide-format space, but quality doesn’t necessarily suffer. “You can put through more boards per hour,” he said, “but the dpi resolution and ink quality are pretty much the same” no matter how slow or fast a machine runs. “And the QS2’s rated speed of sixteen 4x8-foot boards per hour is plenty fast for us right now.

 One of the first things Spartan did was to hire an experienced operator.

High quality at slower speeds

A major part of Canon Solutions America’s (CSA) offering is operator training, which focuses on applications. Randy Parr, CSA senior marketing specialist, agreed with Trebilcock’s wide-format quality assessment. “Our entry-level Océ Arizona printers, such as the 318 GL model, still have exceptionally high image quality” when compared with higher-end devices, such as the newer Arizona 6100 series, which can print in six and seven colors at speeds as fast as 1,668 square feet per hour. New operators can be trained on a variety of specific applications, especially those that can command higher prices like day/night backlit images and lenticular effects, Parr noted.

For a print firm new to wide format, the investment is substantially less for a less speedy model, Parr said, yet the image quality is so high that the more basic Arizona 318 GL garnered two awards at the SGIA show last fall. (Some wide-format printers are priced under $20,000 and can be leased for around $400 per month over five years.) The cool thing “is a customer can upgrade to a mid-volume printer one to two years down the road – and mixing and matching colors between the devices will be no problem,” he said.

G7 color calibration now is yet another wide-format advantage, according to Mutoh’s Dave Conrad, marketing director for North and Latin America. “The prepress/offset world can now be incorporated in large-format printers,” he said. In 2014, Mutoh announced the first two printer models -- the ValueJet 1624 and 1638X -- featuring IDEAlliance G7 certification and on-board SpectroVue M-10 spectrophotometers. “These help tie in color management and process control across all print platforms in a large commercial printer work shop,” Conrad explained.

CSA’s Par cautioned, “The perception out there is that if you print slower, the end result will be better quality. But that’s not necessarily the case, unless you’re printing high-end POP that’s held a foot from your face. You need to meet your customer’s quality expectations, whatever those may be.” When considering a wide-format printer, he urged, “keep in mind that a range of speed translates to flexibility.”

‘Excitement in the plant’

Back in Texas, continued Trebilcock, “Putting in the Esko cutter at the same time [as the VUTEk printer] allows us to do more than just banners and square-cut work. We can do things like acrylic cut-outs.” Spartan’s job gamut spans literally floor to ceiling: from ceramic tiles to ceiling tiles and clear light covers in a dental office. “We’ve even done glass, aluminum, and outdoor signage,” he reported.

Trebilcock shared that the addition of the wide-format equipment has created quite a buzz among most of Spartan’s 50+ employees. “The opportunities seem unlimited compared to our offset experience of the last 30 years or so,” he said. “It is [still] ink on paper, but there is a general excitement in the plant.” The firm is developing a niche in specialty rigid materials, he added. “Everyone does banners, but a lot of what we are doing requires specialized, contour cutting on styrene, acrylic, and aluminum.” To achieve this, Spartan received one week of on-site cutter training from Esko Graphics. “We were fairly fluent after that ... although we struggled in prepress a bit,” he admitted.

The prepress solution was the subsequent purchase of the Esko i-cut workflow software suite a few months later. “The i-cut software basically eliminated manual placements,” Trebilcock explained. “For example, if we are running 30-up on a sheet, the technology separates the print file from the cut file and nests it [accordingly].”

In 2014, wide-format work accounted for approximately 5 percent of Spartan’s annual sales, Trebilcock reported. “We got our name out there, and it was a good start. We’ve seen increases each month. Our goal for this year is 10 percent,” he said. Determining how to price the various wide-format work has been part of a trial-and-error process, he added.

In addition to meeting the pricing and prepress challenges, Trebilcock had this advice for other traditional print firms like his looking to become active in wide format: “Do your homework on the front end and find out what devices fit you well because it is a major investment. Once you have it, they [customers] will come.” Spartan Printing’s customer base is just as excited about wide format as its employees are, he concluded.

CSA’s Parr also agreed about the application point as it relates to firms’ bottom lines. Whatever your primary applications are, “you need to print them as fast as possible so they’re still sellable,” he said. There’s no doubt about the best part of adding wide format services to a shop that has had relatively flat or extremely slow-growth sales over the past five to seven years: It’s the margins, Parr pointed out. Which would you rather bill, after all, “pennies per sheet or dollars per square foot?”