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I recently traveled around the world and decided to take a qualitative check on commercial printers as I went. The good news is that I found a lot of printers. The bad news is that almost none of the places I visited use any production software. My first stop was to India, detailed in a previous blog. I then made my way over to France, specifically Paris. While there are quite a few commercial printers in the city, none that I visited used anything more than design and eCommerce4Print software. Work generally arrives as PDFs or native design files via websites, thumb drives, or email.
Paris is a very crowded city with narrow streets, limited parking, no storage space, and small commercial printers scattered across town. Printers wrap finished jobs in brown paper and twine before loading these parcels on the backs of two-wheelers to deliver to nearby clients. (Using a car or delivery van would be problematic on those narrow, crowded streets.) And Parisians seem to approach printing much like food shopping. Americans will pick up a couple of factory-baked bread loaves and toss them in the freezer for a week or two. Parisians prefer to purchase individual, hand-baked baguettes that are made fresh every morning to consume that day. So print-on-demand makes sense to them, but concepts like workflow automation appear to be untranslatable.
| It was not difficult to find commercial printers in Paris. |
CopySelf
CopySelf has been in business since 1988 and now has three locations. These are Xerox shops with cutting-edge printing and design services. The flagship store has walk-up copiers in the front with a few light production presses and two roll-fed Mimaki wide format printers in the back.
CopySelf has an eCommerce4Print website where customers can order posters, cards, leaflets, spiral- and perfect-bound booklets, flyers, t-shirts, tote bags, signage, displays, as well as scripts and screenplays. Both of the shops I visited were packed with walk-in traffic as well as design service customers, so I was unable to spend much time interviewing the owner. However, as impressive as the design and e-commerce side of the workflow was, the staff showed no signs of recognition when I asked questions about color management and MIS/ERP solutions. Perhaps it was my poor French language skills…
| CopySelf has been in business for 35 years, with a trio of locations in Paris. |
MilkPrint
While CopySelf had a familiar printing business model, another printer I visited, MilkPrint, has a strategy that is oh so French. MilkPrint is a commercial printer that is part of the copees.com network, where jobs submitted by clients online are routed to nearby print shops for production and delivery. This means all their work arrives via eCommerce4Print, but MilkPrint does not own such a system. My French is so poor that I couldn’t be sure how copees.com forwards jobs, but it sounds like they arrive as emails with attachments or (possibly) as direct print submissions, but I hope I’m wrong about that.
MilkPrint has a print production facility in the back, along with walk-up copier services, but it does not offer design services. Instead, much of their revenue appears to come from renting time on the 150 PCs in their five-hundred-square-meter basement to gamers and businesspeople, and (because they’re French) from selling coffee and pastries. Hey, I applaud creativity and it appears to be working for them!
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