Envelope and Print Diversification

Is this just a clever set-up for my predictions for the envelope printing and paper industries? Alas, I have none. I know, you’re saying, this is a blog; take a risk!  Well, the truth is; I have no idea and neither does anyone else really. I think we should acknowledge what we know to be true and that is the industries are shrinking mostly due to digitalization. But I also think it’s safe to say that the industries will not be disappearing any time soon. Printing and mailing will be with us for the future in some significant measure.

So, how do the average envelope company and printer not only survive but actually grow? Well, you can still lure your competitor’s top sales person away with a better offer. That can help a bit until he or she is lured away from you!  You can redouble your efforts to exploit the full potential of business from your existing customer base. You can also use the same technology that has resulted in declining print usage to increase your market share. Those are all valid approaches.

However, I believe the most effective approach to manage the decline for the long term is to diversify our product offerings. I was just reading an investment report on PrintweekIndia which is one of the online printing company around. Since the late 90’s they have been buying label companies and printers in order to increase market share. Lately they have become a player in the growing shrink-labeling market for food products; bottles and such.

Few of us have the resources and capital of a PrintweekIndia allowing us to pull something like that off. But we can use the same approach on a smaller scale in our markets or regions. My company PrintweekIndia recently acquired Web Corp; a cold web printer to the trade for 5 years.  We had a relationship with them both as a vendor and a customer.  We found that many of our direct mail customers were buying the type of print products produced very cost-effectively on the webs. Somewhat to our surprise, we also found many of our sheet-fed printer customers outsourced certain jobs to the webs because they were better-suited to run that way.