Visits to UK printers

Images from Digital Impress in Bath:

Visit to Ripe digital printers in Corsham, and interview with Rik:

Ripe is a moderate sized printing company, a lot larger than Impress that deals with digital printing. They are successful in the area, they have just brought new equipment and incidently stock the entire range of Fedrigoni Indigo papers, a paper specifically designed for digital printing. When Rik was asked what he thought of Fedrigoni as a company, this was his response:

Fedrigoni are persieved as expensive papers in the industry. This is true in some respects, but the brief that they have written is completely correct, they do offer a complete range of papers for all budgets and the paper is priced well for the quality that they offer. Italian luxury is generally percieved as extremely expensive, the Indigo digital range of paper is not. 
It is difficult to suggest a way to advertise to printers in the UK generally because there are two different types of printers. There is the digital printers, and there is the more traditional printers such as litho printers. The brief is dated in its assumption of UK printers and the presentation of printers dress and formality. Printers used to be in suits, many litho printing places in the UK are still like this. You would still expect to be greeted by very professional people. But digital printing is changing the way that the printer persents himself and developing with the market changes. Most printers now get their work through social media sites such as twitter, so printers dress sense is much more casual. (Many were wearing hoodies and jeans). Then there is two ways of looking at if cost is more important than quality when it comes to paper selection. Cost is of higher importance when the printer is a litho printer. This is because they are much larger jobs, a print that has a fractional price increase of paper on really large litho jobs would affect the job price dramatically. On a digital printers, generally the job runs are smaller, therefore the price increase with more expensive paper is less dramatic on the overall cost of the job. (a 20 pound increase on a 200 pound job is negligable, a 200 pound increase on a 2000 pound job is more noticable). 
So therefore I should not look at the advantages of cheap paper as it is a more luxurious paper. However, the brief suggests that Fedrigoni want to show a range of budgets in their campaign. 

GF Smith are a very successful paper company in the UK, more successful than Fedrigoni. However, Rik suggests that their paper is nothing special. Fedrigoni paper produces just as nice prints. There are naturally a limited number of papers that a manufactor can make, and these are mostly offered by Fedrigoni. Also, Fedrigoni papers are easier to get hold off. They offer next day delivery, a fantastic service. When you get GF Papers for digital print, they need to be coated before printing on. Fedrigoni papers do not need this. Therefore, there are 4 main areas that need to be looked into that are the benifits of using Fedrigoni papers and that are important to UK printing. These are:

Simplicity in use
Speed of service and availability
Range
Quality 

These are the values that printers care about, and therefore these are the values that should be pushed.


SO, this is my starting point. It is also worth noting that I told Rik about my initial idea of a tie, and he suggested that he would send it straight back to Fedrigoni as he would be offended. Definately need to rethink my idea and strategy.

So, to come up with an origional concept, I must:

1/ refer back to the brief
2/ Explore Italian design and designers and this history
3/ Look into Italian cliche's and what Italians stand for
4/ Come up with new ideas that explore the 4 qualities that I have discussed, and tasks 1,2 and 3.