"No thanks. We aren't interested in foil."
Our customers often hear this when they start offering SLEEKpro foil embellishments. And if you're hearing it too, it's no fault of yours.
Print embellishment technology has made strides, and some processes that were previously expensive and therefore reserved solely for long runs can now be brought downstream to much shorter runs. But often, it’s the industry's best-kept secret, which can come back to bite us.
A great example of this is sleeking (or digital foiling).
Traditional foil stamping involves creating dies, which is expensive, adds to turn time, and allows for static information. Not a bad thing when you're doing long runs of static information. On the other hand, SLEEKpro technology allows users to quickly do digital foiling on very short runs economically.
So today we can not only economically foil a few cards, but we can include and foil variable data on those cards. But we need to make sure the customers know that's possible if not, we'll keep running into resistance.
There are a couple of ways of educating print customers, but we've seen our clients have seen success with these 2 in particular:
1. Samples - spark a conversation with prospects or existing accounts
2. Modified print pieces - This is great for showing existing accounts what's possible. When they order their traditional cards, for example, do a couple with specialty embellishment so they see what the possibilities are and the cost.
A lot of the time, customers don't realize the impact that they can make by spending a little more. And that's a problem for both you and them.
Years ago, one of our clients had a customer who came to them with an idea. They had four versions of a soft cover book in two sizes, and they wanted a different foil outlay to go around the outside edges of the front and back cover.
Our client quoted it out for foil stamping, and the die cost came back at over $3,000 a run. For 50 books of each size, their customer said no, and they ended up printing the book with a self-cover saddle stitch, gave up on the original idea, and went totally vanilla. Basically, it lost the impact and wow factor that it should have had.
Fast forward to today, our client now has sleeking equipment. He went back to that customer, started talking about embellishment, and literally blew their mind with the fact that he could produce that job with minimal extra cost.
Of course, there were no $3,000 dies involved, and our client was able to work quite a bit of that profit into his new quote and make quite a bit on that job.
So yes, people aren't only very interested in foil, but they're also willing to pay for it because of the impact that foil and other print embellishments can have on their pieces.