A Broader Portfolio Makes for Broader Revenue Streams

Personalized interior design for both home and corporate environments is a rapidly growing market. Adhesive floor graphics, wall decals and floor-to-ceiling wallpapers and coverings provide an affordable, easy-to-apply, semi-permanent solution for customers looking to decorate, customize and brand their spaces with unique designs.

In an always-on, smart-everything world, the race for attention is on every second of every day. Before investing, print buyers want to be confident they’re choosing the right partner to cut through the static. Today’s customers are looking for a one-stop shop that offers a variety of products to meet their needs. Meanwhile, as the technology that enables wide-format and signage printing becomes more affordable and accessible for print providers, the line between the two is blurring. Substrate diversity in the wide-format space has massively increased this decade, allowing wide-format to edge into traditional signage work, encouraging printers to bring both under the same roof.

One major technology driving these changes is UV printing. These devices, with their fast, low-temperature curing are incredibly and increasingly popular. The low curing temperature plays a vital role in printing directly to thin, flexible and low-melting-point substrates. This comes at a time when flatbed, roll-fed and hybrid devices are all making advances of their own, similarly driving substrate diversity.

At the same time, wide-format’s increasing flexibility and signage use cases are helping to bring digital print advantages to wide-format and signage alike. Instead of carefully printing small promotional items one by one, specialized jigs can turn flatbeds into high-volume production machines. Device-agnostic digital workflows can bring variable data into the mix, helping to automatically regionalize or customize signage, more precisely targeting communicators’ audiences.

These evolutions are significantly influencing the market toward even more convergence and consolidation — it’s a self-reinforcing trend.

Much of this influence shows up in how print buyers behave. In addition to being incredibly discerning, today’s print buyers are largely looking for a one-stop shop, where they can take care of their wide-format, signage and even sheetfed needs all in one place. This makes purchasing and production a lot simpler, yes, but it also consolidates more purchasing power with a single buyer.

If you’re getting flyers, lawn signs and window clings all from the same provider, you represent a bigger chunk of that company’s business than you would at three separate specialist shops. That gives print buyers in the new, consolidated world of print leverage. Buyers can use this leverage to pursue deals on bulk buys or packages or put the pressure on to make sure jobs come out just right, with pitch-perfect consistency across all channels. This doesn’t make print buyers and print providers antagonistic, though. Rather, it provides an opportunity for buyers and providers to work together more closely and at greater lengths, developing stronger working relationships, as well as a better understanding of one another’s needs and capabilities.

These technological evolutions — and related print buying behavior — have granted print providers a great opportunity to grow their toolbox. As wide-format shops expand their signage capabilities and vice versa, tertiary markets, such as packaging, and décor, open up to them. For instance, if your signage shop doesn’t produce enough promotional items to justify adding a new device, you likely won’t get the equipment. Imagine a client walks in asking for a sign for their event and some promotional USB thumb drives — you’d have to send them elsewhere. But if you’ve already started adding wide-format capabilities, you can knock out both tasks and keep the client entirely in-house.

Even if promotional items, wall clings or whatever else aren’t your shop’s bread-and-butter, one-stop buyers are more likely than ever to ask “can you also do X?” Blurring lines between wide-format and signage are giving shops more opportunities to answer “yes.” When your next customer with an outside-the-box idea comes knocking, what will your answer be?