Do you handle digital printing for clients, if asked?

I often have clients ask if I will quote part of a wedding suite as letterpress and the other part digital. Do others do this? I feel that it takes away from my core business esp. since it can be very time consuming to color check with a printer, etc. However, I don’t want to turn away business. Any thoughts or tips?

Hi Cara,

I’m interested what others do as well . . . I will sell digital printing as long as the project also includes a letterpress component. I mark up the digital printer’s prices to cover the time I spend ordering, picking up, color checking, etc. Offering digital printing has sometimes allowed me to get a job I wouldn’t have otherwise landed because they’re able to order everything from the same printer.

Thanks for the input! I wouldn’t want to lose a job over it, so it’s helpful to hear your experience. 

I get this question a lot as well. I work with a couple of different local printers for things that I can’t do in my shop, but I focus most of my efforts on pushing the letterpress work. Especially with wedding invites, I find a lot of brides want the invite to be letterpress, but the RSVP digital since it won’t stay with the invite in the long run and it can help cut down on the costs some.

Local print shops are also fun to tour and make other printer friends. Having friends in the industry is very valuable if you end up in a pickle on a job.  

I do offer this, but I work at a digital print shop so I’m in complete control of color, stock, timing etc. We keep the 90# Lettra Digital in stock at work so I can run the digital portion on the same paper as the letterpress portion most of the time. It can be a hassle, but it can help with brides on a budget- if they can’t afford to have multiple pieces printed letterpress, they might be able to do the main invitation with the rest as digital and I’ll still get the job. I always note that the color match may not be exact between the processes but it’s been pretty good so far!

While I don’t print so much anymore, I design invites from time to time and I offer letterpress/digital printing combos to brides who want to save a little bit of money. The color matching is a bit of a pain, especially if it’s running on digital and not offset where you can specify the Pantone color to match. I recently did a job where the bride wanted letterpress invites and digital printed RSVP/info cards, I had the digital printer print me a special swatch sample page on the digital Lettra I intended to print on and I found a close match to the letterpress prints, only to get a call from the printer that said “um, these are printing grayish-purple” — I was trying to match a coppery/gold color. My bride was flexible and we were able to switch to the closest paper we could get to the Lettra.

My advice is…find a few local printers you can trust, make sure you let them know you’re trying to match to a letterpress print and provide them with a sample of what you’re trying to match (that’s what saved me!) and CYA by mentioning that the color match may not be exact, like Val said above.

Good luck! 🙂

Thanks everyone!

I do combinations of digital printing/letterpress printing. I just finished an eight piece wedding suite with five letterpress pieces and three digital pieces. Well, ink jet pieces. I find that my ink jet can get a close color match and digital Lettra accepts the ink beautifully. It’s pretty time-consuming (I run a page at a time through the rear paper feeder), but it comes in handy to have this service available for certain pieces. For the order I mentioned above, the client had their wedding website insert, a schedule of events, and a small save the date for a separate event digitally printed. None of those pieces really needed to be letterpress printed and I was able to provide them with the invitations that they really wanted. Plus, I was able to get additional business from them for other pieces of day-of wedding stationery, some of which will be letterpress and some of which will be digital.

I’ve done that as well- in fact, the job I am working on has both digital (ink jet) and letterpress components. I’ve seen it called a variety of things; I’ve settled on calling it hybrid. It is time consuming and mine was a pain, as I could not for the life of me get it to feed through the rear of my printer, so it took me over and hour and a half to handfeed them through my Epson R3000. And that was only 25 sheets of Lettra! The mother of the bride came back and asked for digitally printed thank you cards and since I already had a plate for the monogram, I letterpress printed them and basically presented this upgrade as a gift ( I know them well and they have been wonderful to me!). No joke, it took me 15 minutes to set up and run 100 one color thank you cards vs what it would’ve taken me to do them digitally. 😉

[Author]

Posts