The printing industry is certainly changing, but contrary to some of the bearish sentiments out there, it is not going away. The need for architects, engineers, construction managers, designers, artists, marketers, etc. to “mark on substrate” will continue long into the foreseeable future. The persistent questions are: What is the future for the local print shops? How will the print industry evolve in the digital age? And, what can the local print shop do to adapt to changing demands?
We at blueprintsprinting.com clearly have some ideas about the answers to these questions. We are partnering with professional, quality focused, local print shops strategically located around the country to offer rapid turnaround wide format printing to our customers nationwide. Observing market trends, the digital shift, and our experiences running a brick and mortar print shop for over 8 years, we were able to anticipate the increasing demand for greater printing convenience and speed. These days project deadlines are tighter, couriers and trips to the local print shop are more expensive both in terms of time and money, and interrupting the workday to deal with print shop sales people and customer service is increasingly viewed as an unnecessary distraction. Indeed, we are finding that our customers greatly appreciate being able to upload their files for printing, get an instant quote on both printing and shipping, order right from their desks, and have the printed documents show up at their home, office, or job site as quickly as the next day.
In the age of Amazon, Alibaba, and Vista Print, our customers expect quick turnaround, delivery, and convenience. Those are just the things that blueprintsprinting.com consistently aims to provide! We provide our local print shop partners with access to a nationwide market, and our platform takes most of the order processing work of their shoulders so they can just focus on their business and keep their printers running. Meanwhile, on the customer side of things, the pdf handling software on our platform will soon allow easy merging, extracting, editing and uploading of files. Our plan room will allow user friendly sharing of project files with all of your collaborators in the field and across the nation. We want our system to be simple to use for everyone – from the hurried project manager to the office manager at the small architecture firm. You shouldn’t need to be a tech wizard or understand all of the industry jargon to be able to order your wide format prints from us.
The economy by most measures has fully recovered from the Great Recession, new construction and home building continues to trend upwards, and printing is enjoying a revival and an evolution. New print machines like the HP PageWide that our print partners are now using are pumping pages in both color and black and white at record speeds. The local print shops are consolidating, specializing, and becoming much more efficient. Blueprintsprinting.com is helping them do it.
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