Canadian Trade Printers — Going North of the Border

Toronto is home to many wondrous icons, from the CN Tower on down to hockey’s Maple Leafs. But, to the printing industry, the greater Toronto area is a fertile feeding ground for farming out excess volume or special needs jobs to the scores of printers to the trade that thrive here.

It is a curiosity that so many printers to the trade are based in and around Toronto, but there are advantages to taking this route. Many of the trade businesses are relatively young, thus, much of the equipment in these shops is new. For many, an outside sales force is unnecessary. And, now, with Chinese and Indonesian coated free sheet paper imports carrying a hefty tariff, it’s yet another way for a U.S. printer to save some money outsourcing and remain competitive in its bidding process.

“The Toronto market is home to a group of companies that developed the model, including Prodigy Graphics and West Star,” notes Dennis Low, president of PointOne Graphics, based in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, Ontario.

PointOne started as a back-alley duplicating shop that was more of a service bureau. Late in the 1990s, the company obtained its first 40˝ press, and its growth skyrocketed. The printer moved into a 70,000-square-foot facility two years ago, and now operates 24/7 with 100 employees and annual sales of $30 million. Buoyed by a fleet of sheetfed presses, including a Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 105, PointOne recently installed its first web, a five-color MAN Roland Rotoman.

Versatility is key for PointOne, with a product and service package that is all over the map—catalogs, direct mail, point-of-purchase materials, annual reports, even pizza flyers. Most of the shop’s work is acquired through brokers, though PointOne also counts some of North America’s largest printers as its customers.

“Anybody can buy equipment, but only a few are able to deliver on price, quality and service,” Low contends. “We’re also far exceeding everyone’s expectations. We’ve developed a level of confidence with our clients, and we tend to look for long-term relationships. A lot of trade printers will do a job and move on to the next one, but we look at the long term.”

Finding Their Groove

PointOne seems to have found its groove in recent years. It ditched outside sales because “we were terrible at managing the salespeople and, when you start managing people on the road, it gets a bit complicated,” Low says. “So, one day we said, ‘We have good prices, so let’s give them our best price going in, and people will come to us.’ Our reputation grew and grew.”

Another trade printer that is enjoying rapid growth is Burlington, Ontario-based The Print Machine, which is coming off a year in which it generated $8 million in sales, with an ambitious growth initiative of 50 percent targeted in the coming year. Its product portfolio includes brochures, newsletters, booklets, postcards, catalogs, flyers, CD covers and manuals.

According to Rais Kahn, president of The Print Machine, his company services brokers, printers, ad agencies and designers. There is no direct interaction with print buyers. The Print Machine enjoys a diverse mix of clients—local and national in both countries. It helps that Burlington is situated about an hour from both Toronto and Niagara Falls, making it an attractive alternative, especially to Canadian printers.

“We’ve added more equipment and we’re looking at getting another press,” Kahn says. “We’ve expanded our prepress department and have bolstered our bindery with a Heidelberg stitcher and a new Stahl folder. We’ve hired more CSRs, and we’ve moved ahead with ISO certifications. All of these elements are going to help generate more business for us.”

The press arsenal for The Print Machine has grown in a short timeframe from one small press to four, including six- and eight-color Heidelberg Speedmaster SM 102s. The four-year-old company started with just four employees, but has grown to 35.

So what makes Canada an attractive option to The Print Machine’s American customers? “A lot of brokers and printers in the United States, especially in New York, feel much more comfortable placing the work in Canada because they know we won’t be there next time to grab the order directly,” Kahn says.

Amazing Growth

Mississauga, Ontario-based Print 44 emerged on the scene four years ago with a crew of three. The name itself comes from Latitude North 44; most major metropolitan cities in Canada are on or around that latitude, and it’s the area Alex and Mazyar Ekbatani wanted to focus on in obtaining customers.

Today, Print 44 boasts 24/7 operations backed by a crew of 36. Much of the growth has been dictated by client needs, as opposed to obtaining capacity and trying to sell it, notes Mazyar Ekbatani, whose duties include sales and marketing.

Aside from prepress, print and bindery services, Print 44 offers specialty finishing, kit assembly, mail processing and fulfillment. The company produces a wide range of products, including magazines, catalogs, brochures, pocket folders, newsletters, flyers, booklets and annual reports. Print 44’s client list is comprised of print management companies, publishing houses and graphic design firms, along with small printers that lack production capabilities and bigger ones that need to channel overflow work.

Another new kid on the block is Trade Secret Printing, which opened its doors in 2000. Originally a digital and one-color shop—with two ABDicks and some Multis—Trade Secret used to farm out some of its four-color work. But owner Bashir “Dave” Harb didn’t care for the quality of work or service he was getting, so he decided to go into four-color sheetfed printing.

“If there was a problem with the quality of the job, they (Trade Secret’s suppliers) would say, ‘Well, you can reprint it, but at your own cost.’ It was their way of saying, ‘Take it or leave it, or else pay us again.’ That got Dave mad enough to start his own trade shop,” notes Chris Wallans, general manager.

Trade Secret, too, has amassed an impressive press lineup in a short time, nabbing a six-color Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 102, a 10-color Speedmaster SM 102, a four-color SM 52 and a four-color MAN Roland 300. Another CD press sits in storage as the company looks to finalize a deal that will relocate the printer to 100,000 square feet in Etobicoke. A web press is in the plans for the first quarter of 2008, as well, and a perfect binding acquisition is also planned.

Its product mix includes brochures, catalogs and annual reports for verticals including housing, aerospace and technology.

Trade Secret’s customer base is a 70-30 split between brokers and other printers. The company has a strong following in Ontario, including Toronto, Ottawa and Sudbury, on into Quebec with Montreal. New York and California comprise a fair share of its U.S. market, bolstered by favorable paper prices and shipping terms.

Wallans believes it is the Canadian printer with an old mindset—and equipment to match—that has provided an environment for trade printers to thrive. “A lot of the salespeople for these older printers were dissatisfied with the equipment that they were printing on, so they started shopping outside their plants,” he says. “Many of them then became brokers. Or a printer wouldn’t have the range of equipment it needed to be competitive. Salesmen were losing web jobs and small-format work. Once you lose one job, sometimes you lose the whole account.” PI