Hi, I’m Pat McGrew. This is another episode of Print Sample TV and this time featuring my friends at Ricoh. I’ve been to several shows in the last six months where Ricoh’s done some really nice work in their print samples. One of them that made me giggle and at the Epigraph Show in Brazil recently, they had a table full of these boxes and I thought, “Well, that’s really kind of cool and yeah, I know that the Pro Cs can do this kind of box. It’s really nice.” But when you opened the box, it had a cupcake in it. That show was several months ago so the cupcake is gone.

But what I thought they did a really nice job of was showing that with the Pro C they could create this type of very simple box. It could have all been personalized, it could have been customized to the show. There were a million things they could have done with the box. I just thought the format was brilliant and if you think about it for showing the power of what you can do with some equipment that you might already own, I thought they did a really nice job with that. It’s a nice job. This was from the Brazil team from Ricoh, and I thought they did a brilliant job. Now the Ricoh UK team also does some pretty brilliant things and one of the things that arrived in my mailbox recently was this. And on the outside, “Pat, we love digital print.” And Pat loves digital print too so that spoke to me. It was this really interesting piece and I, forgive me, Ricoh, it got a little smashed in my suitcase coming to do the taping here, but they did a really nice job with this.

And so when you open it up, it has a card that comes out that hang that actually has a box of chocolate or a tin of chocolate that also has my name on it. And then it had another card inside that, “Pat, we know as a print ambassador you love personalization as much as we do. Personalization, personalized print drives engagement with Royal mail figures stating that last year 48% of British adults took action after receiving customized mail.” This is not just a UK story. This is a global story. Every post in the world has these types of statistics that they can share with you no matter where your printing organization is located. If you’re not engaging with your local post, you should be because they have a lot of information that can help you create unique marketing stories that you can then leverage as you’re pitching your clients.

This one caught my eye because not only did they use my name, they sent me chocolate. That is always a quick way to my heart. It was very nicely packaged, very nicely produced and very nicely sent out, so thank you Ricoh UK. I think you did a really great job and I love being called a print ambassador. It’s so much a part of who I am. Now, Ricoh has brought a number of interesting technologies to market this year and a couple of them just blow me away every time I see them. And so this is, it’s almost a little bit hard to see unless you’re sitting like I am right on top of it. But this is just a black stock and all they’ve done is printed on it with clear toner. Just clear toner, no color at all. And I can’t tell you how rich this feels.

This is not an expensive thing to do if you have this equipment and the clear toner enabled on your Ricoh device. And it is something that any car dealer, any high-end salon, resorts, hotels, anyone who deals at the higher end of the luxury commercial market and consumer market, they would fall in love with this. This is something that is very easy to implement. Now your designer has to understand what you’re going to do. And so as an ambassador of print, let me tell you that making sure that the designers you’re working with understand what you’re trying to accomplish is essential. Also, making sure that the designers that your customers work with know what you’re capable of is essential. As the printing company, you may find that what you need to do is develop your own design guide that is keyed to the equipment that you have and the capabilities that you have.

Because if you can do this, you certainly want designers to be able to design for it. And it’s not trivial because our folks at Ricoh did a really great job of showing what happens when you really take advantage of the different styles that they have. What they’re showing is what happens when you print with white underlayment on their new equipment. This digital white has gotten to be very popular. A lot of the hardware vendors have at Ricoh do a great job with it.

But if you don’t have a designer who understands how to build the layers for it, then you’re not going to get the pop that you get when it’s fully utilized. Getting the design guide as part of your print sample program is absolutely essential. Making sure that the designers that you’re working with understand how to leverage the gamut that you expand to when you have white underlayment. Absolutely essential. I want to thank Ricoh, Ricoh Brazil, Ricoh UK, Ricoh in the US, Ricoh in Japan, Ricoh in Australia for all of the great print samples. I’m Pat McGrew. This is Print Sample TV, and I hope you’ll come back for another edition.