Mike states “If you’re a larger company who does a lot of printing throughout the year, generally you will be working with quite a few print vendors to get all your items that you need which can become frustrating and quite frankly, exhausting. You may have an apparel vendor who does your shirts and hats for your internal employee hiring and events. You might use multiple online vendors to get cheap marketing materials and pay with a credit card, and another vendor who you have to send a PO to get all your trade show items. You might go to another vendor for internal printed decor, and yet another vendor for promotional items and swag. Then you have another vendor for your manufactured items, like bags or boxes. Then you have to keep track of everything, and ship it wherever it needs to go. It’s a lot to handle.”

This is the way things are done in the printing industry. It’s not a problem companies know they have, because it’s always been standard practice. Printing is split up into many sub sectors as each type of item is printed differently and requires specialized equipment to do them all. So companies will go out and try to find the best vendor to fit each need throughout the year. 

 

Ian Cousins, general manager of Creation Station Printing with over 18 years in the print industry agrees. “You’re working with 5-10 different print vendors, all with their own way of doing business, with different online portals, different ways to proof items, different file requirements, different ways of accepting payments, and different ways of communication. This takes a ton of time from whoever is doing the print vendor negotiating to figure out and keep track of. And when there’s employee churn within a company, it can get even more messy”. 

 

Mike says “Right, and the service offerings for each one vary. And most of the time, each vendor is responsible for making the most money at the time on that particular job. So the customer might not be getting the best product or service for their needs. Because the customer is using multiple vendors and getting multiple quotes all the time, there’s no real loyalty from the vendor side. So instead of figuring out what’s best for the customer, they just quote based on what the customer asks of them. Because the print industry is so vast, there may be better products or services to better fit this particular need that’s less expensive that the customer has no idea exists.”

Creation Station Printing has aimed to put an end to this chaos. They essentially  become a partner company’s in-house print shop, where the main goal is to understand the client-company’s needs, and give them the best solutions to all of their marketing efforts, event needs, internal operations requirements, and giving them a one-source provider for all things print. 

 

Creation Station has created a way to give these customers an easy way to reorder all of their bulk items, store all of these products throughout the year, and create online branded business storefronts and portals to check inventory, ship items as needed to any location anywhere in the country, pre-packages the items, and fulfill all these items as needed at any time. 

 

Mike states “There are some providers out there who provide this service in a limited fashion, but have done a very poor job at executing for the customer. We give our customers beautifully branded websites that allow them to give access to their entire teams, and because our platform is so modular and customizable, we can mold the processes for each client individually, making it easy for them to integrate this system into their business operations model”.

 

Ian says “We’ve essentially put an end to having to keep up with a bunch of vendor relationships, and give our customers a way to get everything under one roof. This creates a loyalty program for both the customer, and Creation Station Printing. We aren’t worried about profit margins and getting the most out of our customers on each order, because we know we will be getting all of their business. So our job is to get them the best items for the job, at the best possible price.”