F1 Colour: print buying and prepress at the right pitch
London repro supplier F1 Colour has a fast growing print management arm, following its decision to employ specialist skills two years ago.
F1 Colour’s print management service is designed to be advantageous to those that suffer headaches searching for the necessary time to buy print effectively. It is a benefit to the time-poor, rather than the timerich, you might say.
“Most production managers are very busy people, they don’t have the time to get multiple quotes, check out new suppliers, or break a job down to send each part to a specific specialist company. They are forced, by time restraints, to use the same suppliers regardless of whether they are the right choice for a particular project. So we aim to be an additional production resource to be used when needed,” says F1’s MD Ken Harrison.
As a prepress company better known for its magazine repro skills though, F1 Colour is perhaps an unusual player within the print management field. Although the print buying work it carries out for clients is on an ad hoc basis rather than contractual, it has invested in specialist skills to ensure that it has the right expertise to get the best results, most notably employing David Sink to run the print management side of the business. After just two years, print management already represents 30 percent of the London repro supplier’s turnover.
Sink came to the company from a print company in Staines, and for a decade in the mid 1980s to mid 1990s ran his own print management company. What F1 Colour is therefore clearly not doing is just purporting to possess print management expertise. Its print management expertise is real and extensive.
Sink has the contacts in the industry, the print knowledge and the time to manage print properly: to audit print suppliers; to go that yard further in getting a range of quotes; to assess and make decisions about the balance of price versus quality and ability to meet delivery dates.
Mostly, clients are production managers at publishers, agencies and corporates.
For corporates it ranges from signage to incentive gifts but for publishers, the print management that F1 undertakes is generally the ancillary print that helps the client function, rather than the main magazine print run. This can be short run reprints of the title, or just stationery.
Harrison says: “Production staff at publishers quite often have enough to deal with in the processes of getting their magazines to print, we are not doing anything that they couldn’t do themselves given the time, this way they know that the smaller tasks are being looked after correctly and efficiently.”
For all its clients, F1 is able to offer a service that stretches from photography through to print management, with its core repro skills placed centrally. It can therefore create a piece of work, ensure its production quality and place the print with high quality suppliers – as it has done recently on a brochure for MFI.
Quite apart from its ability to manage the print supply chain on behalf of its clients in the search for more cost efficiency, the fact F1 has its hand on the quality control button means smoother production and improved relationships with the printers it uses.
“We will supply all our printers with ISO standard PDFs and colour accurate proofs to Fogra standards. While we are doing print management for a client, we are also adding value because we’re checking for RGB, for bleeds and cut outs etc. A client does not just give us a disk and we give it to the printer. We keep quality control under our control.
“It’s the same principle that we would employ, if a job is presented in good order it saves time and money, so by providing our printers with colour managed, pre-flighted files we can take advantage of, and they are willing to give, preferred rates.”
F1 does not promise savings in print management, as it would need to know what the customer was spending on print to start with. It merely asks its clients to be open minded about what it can achieve on their behalf, even offering to double check quotes that a client may have attained themselves to establish how effective their print buying is. If nothing can be added by F1, then it’s a case of congratulation, not recrimination.
What it does not do is squeeze printers for the cheapest price, and nor does it indulge in “Dutch auctions”, playing suppliers off against each other. This is no way to maintain healthy, respectful relationships with printers and would therefore be self-defeating.
“I won’t go into a Dutch auction,” says Sink. “We will go to a variety of suitable printers for quotes and if they ask for feedback as to why they were not chosen we will tell them. The work does not necessarily go to the cheapest either – it’s the quality, suitability and ability to make the deadline.”
Harrison considers that F1’s selling proposition is based on being able to offer a friendly and personal service. This is not an operation geared for multi-million pound print management contracts, but nevertheless similar kinds, if not volumes, of benefits are on offer for clients – there may be cost savings, there will certainly be less procurement headaches, and there will invariably be further value that can be added through quality control and knowledge of printing processes.
As a prepress house, F1 also has some hefty workflow technology that can be used for print management. With Sink at the helm of the service though, the business is invariably done on a personal basis.
“There’s a certain mentality at F1 – we do things in a certain way, small, friendly and helpful but we have the technology as well and we are very professional,” says Harrison.
Clients
- MFI
- L'Oreal
- Team Saatchi
- Allingham Kyte
- CGI Group
- Corus
- The Brookwood Partnership
- Immediate Network
- Maison Blanc
- Tozer Marshall Design
- Seven Publishing
- Westfi eld Associates
Allingham Kyte
David Sink has been working with Keith Allingham of advertising agency Allingham Kyte for over 20 years, and when Sink joined F1 Colour to head up its print management department, it seemed only natural for Allingham Kyte to follow. F1 has been involved in many projects with Allingham, from stationery to brochures, including producing a range of multi-language booklets. Keith Allingham says he finds F1 is able to save him time and money, by searching the marketplace for the most suitable supplier, thus enabling the agency to concentrate on developing and providing a first class service for its own clients.
He says: “I have worked closely and successfully with F1 Colour on many projects. They are always competitive, their attention to detail is excellent and they always go that extra mile to ensure we have a first class job for clients. They are also always proactive, as with their latest service, Digital Editions, and I can see this will be a very useful advertising medium for many of my clients.”