For Print Shops
You already have the customer and the press. What you don’t always have is someone to hand the creative to — so the job walks out the door and takes the printing with it.
The Short Version
Print shops lose good jobs for a reason that has nothing to do with printing: a customer walks in needing a logo, a label line or a campaign, and there is no one to hand it to. So they go find a design firm — and that firm has its own printer.
Sprout Media is the design department you can hand that customer to without losing them. I have spent three decades on both sides of the glass: designing the work, and managing it through production. I know what your press needs, because I have been specifying it since 1995.
How It Works
A job comes in that needs more than a file clean-up — a rebrand, a package, a campaign — and it is either outside what your shop does or outside what your week can hold.
One introduction. I take the creative brief, the discovery, the revisions and the client hand-holding off your desk entirely.
The design engagement is mine; the printing is yours. That is the whole point — the work routes back to your press, not to whoever the client finds next.
When a customer starts shopping a print job around, the printer is the last one to hear about it. That conversation happens somewhere you are not, and it tends to reach you as a decision rather than a question.
A highly valued designer that’s extremely close to the customer and the account changes that. My work depends on both relationships holding together as much as yours does, so I have every reason to catch the first hint of it — and to open the conversation early, while there is still something to talk about.
Most shops find out they have lost an account. Now, you will hear about it while it is still yours to keep.
What Your Shop Gets
Busy season stops being a reason to turn work away, and you are not carrying a designer through the slow months.
Thirty years of prepress on the other end. Bleeds, traps, profiles, fonts and separations arrive right the first time — fewer preflight calls, fewer press delays.
A customer who needs a brand built usually leaves to find an expert who can build it, and their printing often leaves with them. This keeps them printing with you.
I broker print, but you’re my partner. Work that originates with your shop now has added support to stay at your shop.
A ten-minute phone call is usually enough to know whether this fits your shop. No agreement to sign, no exclusivity, no obligation on either side.