Fit To Print

Printing is not dead — at least, not yet. It seems inevitable that there will come a day when companies will no longer print catalogs, but that day hasn’t arrived yet in the jan/san supply industry. However, justification for the time, resources and expense required to print them comes under growing pressure as technology presents ever-more-sophisticated digital alternatives.

While catalog printing may be declining, another form of printing essential to jan/san remains steady. With jan/san distributors producing and selling private-label products there is demand to print quality product labels, often with in-house printers.

Catalogs

While no one denies that demand for printed catalogs is dwindling — and may one day dry up entirely, there remains a decided group within the customer community that still views the physical catalog as essential.

“I had thought personally that by now we might phase out the entire print catalog and just go with the online version,” says Laura Craven, director of marketing and communications for Miami-based Dade Paper. “But our sales force is so insistent that, even if the customers don’t necessarily use the hard-copy catalog to order from, they have to have it. They have to have something in their hands to flip through. They want to see the color pictures. They want to see everything from A to Z, and then it probably sits on their shelf.”

Printing large runs of catalogs takes money, but it also requires time to compile the information, design the layout and work with the printer. As a result, many distributors — including Dade Paper — are putting less emphasis on print. For example, the company still produces an annual, 150-page catalog (but outsources it) offering users basic information like SKU, basic product descriptions and photos. But at the same time, the distributor produces an online version in PDF format that is much more detailed and empowering to the user. This version includes added details such as product specs and chemical content, as well as the ability to order electronically.

Instead of producing mass quantities of their own catalogs, distributors can cut back their print runs and turn to their vendors for help. Lawrence, Kan.-based Pur-O-Zone relies on its primary product supplier, a buying group. Since Pur-O-Zone carries almost all of the buying group’s products — although Pur-O-Zone also carries other brands — it can simply make use of its catalog to represent that major segment of product offerings, says Mark Elzea, the company’s controller.

For other needs, in-house printing of customized PDFs can serve as individual catalogs for targeted customers.

“A PDF looks very professional, and can be customized very easily,” says Elzea. “So that’s certainly our emphasis. Will we stop doing small runs? Honestly, probably not. There will always be some demand. As someone with an accounting background, I’m not sure I can justify it, but my partners who are in sales can be pretty persuasive.”

For some companies, technology has passed the catalog by. To them, printing is not cost effective and it generates too much waste in general.

For example, no one can persuade White River, Va.-based White River Paper to print catalogs. Sales Manager Jim Keighley says such high-cost print jobs have stopped making sense economically, and have also ceased to be a functional option.

“Keeping up with product changes, keeping up with new product introductions, and really environmental conservation prompts you to look at the cost of the paper or the use of the paper, and the eventual disposal of the paper,” Keighley says. “It’s quite a waste stream, and there are so many products being introduced constantly.”

The last time White River printed a catalog was about eight years ago, Keighley says. That catalog was outsourced to a custom catalog production company. Today, the company focuses on keeping its Web site and online catalog updated, including the capability of allowing customers to make electronic inquiries and receive a quick response.

Labels

If the printing of catalogs is becoming less economical, and arguably unnecessary, the same cannot be said for printing product labels. With many jan/san distributors dealing heavily in private-label products, companies grapple with a variety of options for how best to create and affix labels to the products that will bear their own names.

For small product orders, many jan/san distributors will handle printing in-house. At Pur-O-Zone, for example, the company prints labels on the same printers it uses for short-run catalogs.

“If we have large runs of products where we sell enough to justify it, we have the labels printed commercially,” Elzea says. “Some products we wouldn’t sell 1,000 of in 10 years. For these smaller runs of specialty products, we generate those here on our own printers.”

Even though the labels are printed in-house, Elzea stresses that they are still high-quality products with various colors and images.

“With the printers we’ve got, they can look as good as we want them to look,” he says.

When it comes to mass quantities of products, however, most distributors have no interest in handling the printing. In these cases distributors negotiate with manufacturers to add labels to their packages as an incentive to get the business.

“Our manufacturers label the corrugated boxes as well as, in the case of our technical line, the bottles, jugs and drums,” Craven says. “Rather than doing the production of the labels, we have the manufacturers do it with the artwork we provide. We just don’t want to mess with it.”

At Dade Paper, manufacturers are asked to label all products and cases with the distributor’s private-label brand logos and artwork before shipping. The only economical alternative, Craven says, would be for Dade Paper to affix stickers to the cases, which the company does not deem to be a sufficiently professional option.

“It’s a matter of streamlining our internal process as well as having the cases and the products themselves have a very professional look,” Craven says. “Plus, the quantities we order are large enough that it doesn’t cost us. It’s part of how we negotiate the price of the product, whether it’s a product or a case.”

Since Dade Paper orders product quantities in excess of 50 million a year, the internal operations savings is clearly significant, and the company’s purchasing power makes it possible to persuade manufacturers to do the labels in order to get the business.

Online technology is continually improving and gaining acceptance from users, rendering physical items obsolete. But before catalogs and labels can go the way of the newspaper or hand-written letter, jan/san distributors are listening to sales staffs and customers who say they still play an important role in the cleaning industry.

Dan Calabrese is a freelance writer based in Wyoming, Mich.