Steven Brown and Dave Jackson with a selection of the company’s photobook products.
High Wycombe printer Your Print Solution is pursuing two routes as it seeks to build up its photobook offering, including licencing animated movie content from a major client.
The big idea…it is what many print companies are searching for as they look to build a print business for the future. Steven Brown and Dave Jackson had one, and they are in the process of making it work. The pair set up Your Print Solution as a digital printing concern in High Wycombe in 2006.
For some time now it has counted 20th Century Fox as a customer, and it was to this client that it pitched an idea to license content from some of the movie maker’s animated films for a whole range of branded items, including customised photobooks that Your Print Solution would print, finish and despatch.
In October 2012, 20th Century Fox gave the go-ahead, and the company had to invest in specialist Fastbind photobook finishing equipment from Ashgate Automation (an Elite XT perfect binder, Casematic H46Pro large format case binder, Fotomount F46e large format ‘layflat’ binder, and Presso thermal press to create grooves on hardback book covers), and Taopix photobook software, all to be used alongside its HP Indigo 7000 press, with HP and Epson large format printers for covers.
The service, which focuses on three animated movies (Ice Age; Alvin and the Chipmunks; and Diary of a Wimpy Kid) went live through Your Print Solution’s Personaball website on 10 December. To start the ball rolling on promoting the offering, it has printed around 1.5 million leaflets that have been included in DVD cases of the films.
A further step in the marketing plan envisages links from 20th Century Fox’s Facebook pages for the movies directly into the Personaball-branded Taopix front end. While it is only three months into the project at the time of writing, and activity is therefore still ramping up, the big idea with 20th Century Fox is not Your Print Solution’s only idea with a photobook theme. To drive further growth in the medium it has employed Barry Tinton, formerly of photobook giant CEWE, and a specialist in photobook sales and production.
Steven Brown told Digital Printer: ‘There are lots of good ideas and you’ve got to take them to the right customer at the right time. We were always being told that the photobook market was huge and we wanted to get a part of it, so we have launched a two pronged attack, one of which is Barry Tinton, and one is 20th Century Fox. Through Barry we are developing our own B2B2C offer for organisations such as sports clubs, charities, and professional photographers. There are plenty of these organisations that don’t currently have a photobook offering.’
Charities, for example, will hold fund raising events, and supplying photography for that event opens up the potential for those taking part to buy a personalised reminder of the day, while also raising more money for the charity.
Mr Brown added that the company was hoping to have two or three more photobook customers before the end of March, and the benefit to the business of the technology that has been installed goes still further. ‘It has allowed us to start offering our other clients personalised case bound books. We are doing jobs now that we were not doing six months ago,’ he said.
There remains the prickly issue of driving traffic to the company’s websites, to turn potential photobook customers into actual ones. Search engine optimisation can only go so far, so how is it possible to compete with the biggest players in this sector, such as CEWE and Snapfish, that top Google’s rankings?
Mr Brown views the issue with a great deal of realism, saying ‘I could never afford to Google myself to the top of anyone’s list – I have looked at what our competitors pay to do it, and we cannot do that’. He believes that he can get there through a more gradual process however, and through developing more ideas for photo products that might also help to extend the 20th Century Fox arrangement into additional movies and territories (it is just for the UK at the moment).
He added: ‘The charity has an audience, the sports club has an audience, and the photographer has an audience. These are trusted brands that people already know about. I don’t think you can do it any other way, unless you find a wealthy backer to put hundreds of thousands of pounds in every other month.’
For the future, and with a fair wind, Your Print Solution is hopeful of making a success of its photobook plans, and other ideas in the pipeline (which also include personalised wallpaper). ‘If we get the 20th Century Fox thing right, we could be blown out of the water with orders.
Then there will be more purchasing needed – that next level up in terms of our finishing equipment. The key is trying to get customers, and then keeping track of what’s going through the factory; the print takes no time at all. It’s all about the quality, making sure the consumables work well, making sure it looks good and that people come back.’
