THE FULFILLMENT OF GICLEE PRINTING

As markets naturally mature, there’s an on-going demand for consolidation as well as innovation. Who would ever have imagined the services that a Giclee printer needs to render today, only a few years ago. I guess it all comes down to streamlining, and efficiency and reducing waste. Over these many years, Harvest Productions has routinely had customers pick up completed prints or most often, we would ship to them, in tubes or boxes, prints on a global basis. It used to be that they would have their own stretcher and framer and shipper/delivery service in order to be able to complete their sale and collect their reward. More and more customers are demanding that this service be all in one, all in-house. Many times I believe it was expected that the way to contain costs was to do as much as you could yourself. In principal, I think this is still correct, in fact but it doesn’t pan out at all. If each customer had a constant sales rate, thereby manufacturing a constant number of prints per day or per week, then they could staff for that consistency. If you didn’t include their management time, you’d save money. But that’s not a world that many of us live in today. In truth, what happens more often than not is that sales are delayed, sales are advanced, sales are below, sales are above – whatever it is that we expect. It’s a global marketplace and on average, things are better than ever but any specific seems to be able to change at any moment. Hence, Harvest fulfillment.

It was in January of this year that Harvest began its first all-inclusive fulfillment services. It was a specific customer who had offices and personnel as well as packaging space and a relationship with its vendors and freight carriers that wanted to close its operation. They had evaluated their cost of operation over the last three years, and knew what their “per unit” fulfillment costs were. They made me a simple offer. We’d be happy to pay you what it costs us anyway if we don’t have to manage it. Quite honestly, I didn’t know what my costs would be and I went on their records and agreed to bring fulfillment under our roof. It’s worked out well for both parties, but for reasons we had not anticipated.

Instead of us making money on fulfillment and them saving money, we ended up enjoying more print orders and they ended up enjoying more sales. Turns out the time that they were spending on customer satisfaction, delivery and accuracy issues, was better spent finding new markets. Their overall sales have increased 23%, which I’m told, relates to a 37% increase in gross margin. Our additional print orders further saturate our overhead costs, allowing us to have lower average rent expense. All in all, a Win Win.

Today, we service six companies in total, some with “white label” as well as some that require the actual installation of the final product. It’s a big chore to keep track of costs, but in the end I think its good business and I’d recommend it.