The Finishing Touches In Commercial Printing

By Author: Brent Durell
Total Articles: 172
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The process of commercial printing is a complicated system that is why the prices should be compute carefully. If not, the commercial printer will stand to lose a lot of money because of wrong computations.

When you go to a printing press and inquire about the printing cost of the job that you need, they will ask what kind (i.e. brochure, flyer, poster, etc.), how many pieces, what kind of material you like, number of sides to be printed, and how many colors for printing (i.e. one-color, two-color, etc.). Then the sales rep that received your inquiry will make computations based on the details that you have given. But aside from the materials, they will have to incorporate labor costs, utilities, and other costs of running the printing company. You will also have to pay for taxes. And that is all computed in what the price that is called the printing cost. That is technically called that because aside from the materials, the printing press has to charge the operational costs to its clients in order to stay afloat as a viable business venture.

But aside from the basic commercial printing ...
... requirements, there are printing extras. These are the finishing touches that you could do without but would make your materials look good.

If you are a printing press, it would be good for you to make ready-made computations for your common printing jobs and just re-compute the figures if there are requirements from the client that are not covered in the price list. But as for the finishing, you can also make ready computations for these so that your sales rep will not have a hard time computing it from scratch. They can just add it on to the cost of printing and immediately inform the client how much their job with cost with the finishing.

For example, the most common finishing required by clients is the lamination because not only does it make the printed material look good, the final output is protected from a lot of elements. So this is really functional. However, not too many clients opt for this because of its additional cost. And sometimes they are fine with their materials being considered the “throw-away” kind by potential customers. Like, after they have already finished reading the contents, they throw the flyer or the brochure away. The companies already know that so that is why they do not have their materials laminated. But there are those who prefer this because their materials are supposed to be kept.

Now, as you offer the laminating add-on, you can already computer per square inch of surface covered. Like the surface of the brochure is 9” x 12” with two sides. So you can already compute the surface area for a single copy of brochure and just multiply it with the number of pieces. You can provide a price list for this to your sales rep so that they can just immediately at it on to their quote.

If given the chance, a commercial printer can do so many printed things for their clients with a lot of extras to make their materials look good, unique, sturdy, and extraordinary. Commercial printing has already evolved so much that is why we already have so many nice materials circulating around.