Should I buy a printer? Need advice.

[Erdy Cem]

Hi all,

Beside our main products what we do, we also do quite a few printed items for our customers existing customers. 90% of our printed items are backlits for the display boards, and the rest is vinyl & mural wallpaper etc. As we don’t have our own printer we subcontract all our print jobs to a local company. I can’t complain about his service and prices but the amount we pay him is £700-£800 approx every month. I know that this money can easily pay off a printer, but our problem isn’t about affording a printer, it’s about the labour/staff. We don’t have any experienced staff who could possibly run the machine and do our jobs as we are mostly on fabricating side of the signage business.

Our supplier uses an old HP 310 latex for our prints. My question is, if I buy a similar printer do you guys think we can manage to use it? Is it easy to operate? Can anyone learn to use it properly in a short time? obviously it’s not just a printer, we would need a laminator and a cutter as well. But we don’t want to recruit a dedicated operator just for this. What would you recommend?

Your views are important for me to make decision. Thanks all

[Hugh Potter]

HI Erdy,

I guess you need to do the sums, lets assume you double the cost of the print as your retail marker, so £1600 worth a month, £800 profit for no real investment, depending the actual costs, you may make £1k..

Now take away the costs of the media, typically 50m rolls only, then consumables such as inks and maintenance, also repayments on the Printer, laminator and cutter, and design / cutting software and Rip centre, you could be spending out £5-600+ a month..

That said, I was subbing out around £3-4k a year, then made the leap, it took a couple of years before I was properly profitable on it, I now retail £2-3k worth a month.

Learning curve on the rip and laminator mainly, if you can cut vinyl already you’ll figure that out quickly.

I could go on but my 11 o’clock is here!!

ps. I went with HP latex. highly recommend.

[Erdy Cem]

Thanks Hugh..