Stretching the print run

When our friends at Grimm Brothers Brewhouse mentioned that they needed taproom punch-cards and brochures, and the folks at Geek Anthem told us that they needed new business cards, and we at Tenfold wanted to print new Bad Design Destroys posters; the wheels started turning as to how to get the best possible printing at the lowest possible cost for each of us.

The solution was a technique in the printing industry called gang-run printing. Ha ha. Yeah, we think it’s a funny name too, but before you go there, it’s a method of printing where you line up a number of items on a large press sheet and print them all simultaneously. Sorry, not as funny as it may seem. Each piece is then trimmed individually. This approach lowers the setup costs for the printer, which is the most expensive part of their process. It also utilizes the entire sheet so that there is very little waste on the project. Thrifty. Green. We’re pretty proud of ourselves.

The limitation of gang-run printing is that every item in the run must be printed on the same stock with the same inks. Of course Grimm, Geek, and Tenfold  wanted beautiful printing done on 120# Classic Crest duplex, epic black/solar white, with a double hit of  opaque white + metallic silver on one side, with metallic silver + black on the other side. So no problems there, other than repeating it ten times fast.

120# Classic Crest comes in sheets of 40″ by 26″ from the mill. Our printer bought 200 of these sheets and cut them down to 400 20″ by 26″ to run through their press. On each 20″ by 26″ sheet of paper we were able to print 2 brochures (800 total), 4 taproom cards (1600 total), 3 business cards (1200 total), 1 Hello tag (400 total), and 1 poster (400 total). The total cost of the print run is $1375, which will be divided between us.

The printing is immaculate. The paper is incredible. This was an expensive print run.

But by doing it as a gang run, we lowered the costs of our posters from $3 each to about $1.50 each (that’s a 50% savings folks in case somehow you missed it). Grimm and Geek experienced similar savings with their pieces. By working together we were able to get the best possible final piece at the lowest possible cost. See, when we work together good things really do happen.