Advice on Greetings Card printers

Hi,

A little back history first...my partner and I are starting up a small business for greetings cards and prints. We recently ordered around 350 cards with 14 different designs from a larger printing firm online (which shall remain nameless of course) which seemed like a good idea at the time.

Upon receiving the products a few days ago and having a quick glance at them before the New Years celebrations we noticed that where was around 10/12 cards with random marks, scratches, random ink blobs, etc. We though this was slightly high for an order this small, but we though nothing of it.

Last night when we actually got time to check the designs fully we noticed that a lot of the colours were off, the resolution seemed reduced and not consistence between cards, some cards seemed reddish in colour as if the pints had shifted or the machines not set up correctly and others just completely darker in colour and shade.

Of course were planning on sending complaining and sending them back asap to try and get out money back, safe to say as a first time customers of theirs they haven't shown us top quality work.

This got us to thinking why not print them ourselves and save on the out lay of having stock excess stock around? We have a Canon MG7150 at the moment which prints much better quality pictures that the prints we got off the 'professionals' and that's with cheap inks off eBay, as doing test prints with real Canon inks is very pricey and i'm too cheap

I suppose the real question is, what printers would you recommend for printing A6 (A5 folded) Greetings Cards and A4 Prints? Do you think the Canon MG7150 with ChromaLife100+ inks be a good idea for the prints?

Obviously money is a factor as we are only a small start up business, but if it's worth saving up a little more money to buy a better printer we would be all for that.

Thanks for any help in advance,
Scott

Hi Scott and welcome, this project has certainly got you thinking about the bigger picture.

But you’ll have to bear in mind that there are others in this market too, like Funky Pigeon and there are even more out there if you care to look..

To start and create your own set-up is going to cost you money no matter how you look at it, the lower you try to keep your costs down the poorer your output and product will be, did I mention lots of space to work in.

Things to start with, your going to need a pigment ink Pro printer that you can easily refill and an excellent ink supplier, then some good quality semi gloss medium weight digital two- sided 180 gm card stock, you may also need a small guillotine and a small creasing machine and of course a supplier of good standard envelopes in various stock sizes.

If you wish to spend more to have a higher quality product where you can have better control over your costs then a digital colour laser printer is the way to go, but if you wish to keep it small and tight then you will get away with a Pro inkjet printer just..

I consider myself a small time card printer. I don't call it a business else I would have to confess that my results prove beyond doubt I am a lousy business person. Mainly do it for enjoyment and pleasure. Whatever that may be!

Firstly I endorse every thing The Hat says in his message. Very good advice.


Now a couple of questions.

• Where are you located? Geographic area will have a big effect on suggestions for hardware and consumables. For example there are significant differences in the economics of printing in Europe or North America
• How many prints do you expect to produce per month or week?

One additional observation - If you are looking at a specific printer make sure it is capable of printing with the necessary small white margins to the size, and on the stock you will be using. In my mind nothing looks worse than an artistic well crafted card with ugly wide margins that spoil the visual effect.

One of my cards attached.

rs

• 
  

Hi, thank for replying so fast especially over the holiday period

The Hat said:

Hi Scott and welcome, this project has certainly got you thinking about the bigger picture.

But you’ll have to bear in mind that there are others in this market too, like Funky Pigeon and there are even more out there if you care to look..

To start and create your own set-up is going to cost you money no matter how you look at it, the lower you try to keep your costs down the poorer your output and product will be, did I mention lots of space to work in.

Things to start with, your going to need a pigment ink Pro printer that you can easily refill and an excellent ink supplier, then some good quality semi gloss medium weight digital two- sided 180 gm card stock, you may also need a small guillotine and a small creasing machine and of course a supplier of good standard envelopes in various stock sizes.

If you wish to spend more to have a higher quality product where you can have better control over your costs then a digital colour laser printer is the way to go, but if you wish to keep it small and tight then you will get away with a Pro inkjet printer just..

Click to expand...

We've done a lot of research into many card printing companies and picked this one as it seemed very reputable and the website was very easy to navigate. They had the best prices and came with an envelope so it seemed like a good deal especially for a first time order. Funky Pigeon only prints their own cards though don't they?

We have contacted a few local companies now to get prices of both card prints or just gettings the A5 prints out selves and folding them our selves to see if it's cheaper or not. We have a guillotine and creasing machines as well as a supplier of envelopes (around 2/3p per 1000), so that's have the battle...

We are trying to source the right card that is right for out designs though, we were looking at more of a 250/300gsm matt finished card as the designs are digital not so much photographic types as Roy posted above.

I was under the impression that laser prints curled the card because of the amount of heat they produced during printing?

Do you have any suggestions on printers inkjet and/or laser printers for digital prints?

Roy Sletcher said:

I consider myself a small time card printer. I don't call it a business else I would have to confess that my results prove beyond doubt I am a lousy business person. Mainly do it for enjoyment and pleasure. Whatever that may be!

Firstly I endorse every thing The Hat says in his message. Very good advice.


Now a couple of questions.

• Where are you located? Geographic area will have a big effect on suggestions for hardware and consumables. For example there are significant differences in the economics of printing in Europe or North America
• How many prints do you expect to produce per month or week?

One additional observation - If you are looking at a specific printer make sure it is capable of printing with the necessary small white margins to the size, and on the stock you will be using. In my mind nothing looks worse than an artistic well crafted card with ugly wide margins that spoil the visual effect.

One of my cards attached.

rs

Click to expand...

I actually work full time, so it's more of my partners job as she is looking after the children full time, I'm here to help out and do research

Were located in the UK, and at the moment were not really sure how much we plan to produce/sell, it's a new market were going into, but as time goes on and hopefully my partner builds up a following who knows....the skys the limit!

The problem we have is keeping the stock in the house. At the moment we have around 12 designs, but in a few months we might have 50+ designs and A4 prints, keeping stock of all this on tight budget (at the moment) is hard to manage, but i suppose thats the struggle most people have!

Our thought was that if we could print them 'on the fly' then we don't need to have stock laying around and we could have as many designs as we wanted

Hi Scott,

Unfortunately if you start off in this business cheap, then you’ll stay cheap because the smaller printers are cheaper to buy but more expensive to run and maintain regardless of brand model, not a great way to get started.

As I said above your going to need an area set aside for your work, and the lounge room or kitchen is not the place, nor is an unheated garage, beside most of the good printers have a very big foot print, plus a laser printer give off a bit of ozone when operating.

I am bios towards Canon printers because I find them easier to refill with 3rd party pigment inks from Octoinkjet in Rotherham, (Up the road from you) and can handle most types of card, I use a couple of Pro 9500’s and a Pro 1, I would love to get one of the OKI C9000 series digital printers.

Epson make extremely good printers too, but I don’t have any to comment on how easy they are to work with graphics and text or refilling, try and find a print shop that would be willing to sell you digital paper stock, you wont need anything heaver than 200 gm trust me, and paper curl can be a problem so be aware of grain direction and how use it to your advantage..

Yeah i guess your right, i think it's something we might look more into in the future if her business grows really well in the first year! It just seemed like the easier option printing yourself rather than relying on others, but it's a lot of work for a start up.

I checked the prices of the printers that you recommended/use and just for the equipment for 1 unit it's going to be around the £500 mark, which just cuts into the already small budget

We've emailed 5/6 local printing companies and had a few responses so were going to see a few test prints tomorrow and hopefully they will be better than what we got from the online place, and it's costing half the price too which is a huge bonus! I really have no idea why we didn't contact local places first, would have saved a lot of time and messing about...

I guess you learn from your mistakes Thanks for all the help, really appreciate it!