Basically, for the past four years Print Provider has been kind of a traditional print broker.

Print Provider is a broker company working within the graphic industry.
But in the past four years, we have also been developing some software and when that software will be released, we need to change our focus.
We have this huge network of very interesting producers or vendors of different kinds.

In that perspective we have decided to use all the potential means, like building what we call a TV channel – Inkish, to attract more people and to become more international.

What we saw amongst, one thing that all have in common is that they are so keen on what is going on in the different workshops.

We tend to be a Global TV Channel, which is pretty ambitious for small channel like ours and with the budgets we have, but also some of the people from the printing industry have started to show interest in actually becoming sponsors for some of our episodes, so that’s cool.

It inspired us to sell to our resellers and if we could get it out in the wild, it would inspire our resellers to sell more to their end clients. That’s of course, one thing and building network is always a good thing for business.

We are now ready to move more internationally, both with the software business that we are doing and also the business we are doing in general.

That was the main reason for starting Inkish. Our intention from the beginning was not to make money. What we would like it to be was being a non-profit channel, so it would be a self-sustaining money-wise after a certain period. We’ve started investment in this because we believe that information is crucial in order to develop any business.

Basically, everything that is printed or used in advertising materials. We are doing that with different partners all over the World and we do that primarily with our professional partners or professional clients and we tend to call them resellers, as they are reselling our services to their clients. That means that Print Provider don’t carry any in-clients themselves. We only work through our resellers and we do that for various reasons. One of the reasons is that we’d rather have fewer clients, but have a steady flow of jobs coming in from well-knows clients. Then, we want to target all the different markets with everything that comes at cost of marketing etc.
We believe that if you look at the print industry, it’s business that has been offering a lot due to the financial crisis, due to changing technology and basically by sharing information about printers, people, technology, events and business – we believe that we can give our little contribution to the printing industry, so that’s why we’ve started to do it. Of course, we aim to make some money on it sooner or later and we have started to get episode sponsors, which is of course needed and important for doing this, because as anyone can imagine it costs money to do this – the editorial process, the making of the film and the music and everything, as well as the travels.

I am the producer and the editor of Inkish TV, so basically all what you see in the finished program and the finished episodes is made here at this post-production studio, where we make the music and we’re making the film recordings. We take the footage here and edit it and shorten it down to make an episode for Inkish.tv.

We’ve been in the Middle East making a portrait from the Print&Pack exhibition in the spring and we can see that after we do an episode in United Emirates, we get a lot of viewers from Arab speaking countries; when we do something from Sweden or from the Baltic, we get a lot of viewers from there and we hope that we can attract people from many different places on the Globe, as we get more and more episodes on the channel.

Basically, it’s kind of a one-man army – I go out, shooting the footage with a camera and recording the sound and also I participate in the meetings about what should we cover. So, it’s not like the old days, where you had a camera man and a sound guy and a journalist – we do everything with very few people at Inkish TV.

Making it easy to also adjust, because if we’ve had like a huge organization, it would be difficult to be spontaneous, but if we get a good idea and we have the right people around us, then we’ll do it right away.

Besides for driving my kids to school, it would probably be trying to get a new advertising agencies, trying to figure it out, following up on previous jobs that we are doing with our existing clients. That would be on a day-to-day basis. I travel sometimes a lot to visit our different vendors, that is both to ensure that we have all the quality aspects in place, to make sure that everybody is in line with our expectations to quality, delivery time and to figure out what’s happening in the market – new technologies, new products, everything that basically turns around our core business, which is selling advertising materials to our resellers.

Also, the music is made here, like this one for instance.

We have like these five keys that are the most important: we have people, printing houses or printers, technology, events and we have business. We try to make portraits and to use programs that are relevant to the print industry and to those five key areas that we are working on. Substantial part of the viewers actually see all the episodes from beginning to end. We don’t try to attract specific viewers on the Internet that only have two minutes.

Honestly, we’ve actually made a very good program about Swedish packaging company – Gafs Kartong and they have purchased a new Highcon Euclid machine and that episode was about 17 minutes or something like that. And in my opinion it’s just like that – if you are in the market to buy a Euclid machine, which probably goes around 1 million euros and I mean, if you don’t have the time to look at 17 minutes and that can give you inspiration from a daily user, then it’s really not worth investing in either. So it is a balance basically, right?

Basically, it’s making friends. For the first time when we meet the client, we introduce them to our different offerings to them, as various services. We have some seminars that we have every month – it could be everything from ‘How to sell?’ to ‘How to handle selling prints on the Internet?’ It could be something about handling production, so that could be seminars. Every Monday morning, we have a Newsletter that comes out to all of our partners and it could be everything from the new things in the industry or new products. It could be special offerings if we know that we have a production running, for instance in China for playing cards, we’ll try to see if anybody else want to buy in on the transport, because buying the product is one thing, but shipping cost sometimes overruns the production cost, so that is something we do.

We’re making a self-portrait of print provider in Inkish, because a lot of people are asking us the questions: “Why is a print broker making a television channel? What are the objectives? Where is the catch? Is there a hidden agenda?” And there is no hidden agenda. It is actually a very, very simple agenda – we want to share information, we have literally covered all the costs so far and we are ready to continue doing that for a long period; also to prove that Print Provider as a print broker is not essential in this TV station at all. What is essential here is that we share information about people. Sometimes people can think that we are making a portrait of a competitor. Yeah, we are, because if we want to be an independent channel and to be taken serious for what we do, we need to have a journalistic approach to everything, which is important.

I generally think that we have something that can help our resellers. A lot of advertising agencies in the mid sectors or small advertising agencies, have a tendency of not making any profits of their printed materials. They basically send a file to the client and then wait for the client to do the printing, with whatever printing house comes in line. That gives, of course no profit for the advertising agency, but it also limits their creativity, in terms of figuring out how to do it in new ways.

We hope that the self-portrait can actually give our viewers an idea of: “That’s why we’re doing what we do”.

When we meet the reseller for the very first time, we prepare a Web shop for them, where they can order all their materials that they are printing with us. They can find up-to-date prices for all of our standard products, which are quite competitive in the market, to say the least. In our Web shop we have guides of different cutting forms, guides on how to do these different products and there is a lot of inspirational materials in our Web sites. So, this is one of the major things that we do for our resellers and we have this genius ‘Friends’ concept, where everything we find on new products – it could be a new way of doing business cards, it could be a new kind of equipment that would enable something that was not seen before, we try to collect that and we send it every month to all of our resellers, to inspire them to do something better for the clients and stand out from the crowd.

Any channel on Internet will be judged on how many people actually see your episodes. We have had almost 17 000 views of programs on the channel so far. We have a lot of viewers and industry is definitely paying more attention to it. We can see that some of the contents we get is not only from people in Denmark, where we are living, but also from both America and Israelian and Japanese company, as well as the American companies, have been interested in what we are doing.

What we will be presenting in autumn is another edition to our existing website, called ‘Inkish View’. Inkish View (New) is view for the University and is basically with the same philosophy that – we want to share as much information with the industry as possible, so with the Inkish View we will build up a system that allows all different vendors of hardware and software and consumables to actually upload tutorials, information videos on how to use the equipment, which is not related to the editorial part of what we are doing, but it is related to the fact that – if we can have one channel where we can attract as many people as possible, then we will also have a channel where we can share that information, which is our key in what we are doing.

If you look at the printing industry today and you want to obtain information, I think that a lot of people are actually searching on Google and YouTube, but there is no one place where you can get a lot of information about the key issues that we are talking about and that’s why we think that: “Okay, if we can make a lot of information available in one website, simple to use and make sure that people get high qualified information, also with the editorial point of view, I think that we’ll actually get positive response from a lot of viewers.”

We are pretty sure that everything will work out fine for Inkish.