Print Solutions Magazine, March 2005 -- Case Study: Binders

International Place office towers shape Boston’s downtown skyline. With a height of 600 feet, the buildings offer a magnificent 360-degree view of the city, including Boston Harbor, Back Bay and the financial district. International Places’ developer, The Chiofaro Company, wanted to attract high-end business tenants and required a first-class marketing piece to promote the office space.

KHJ Integrated Marketing, the advertising agency for The Chiofaro Company, turned to distributorship Graphic Sales Products to provide an eye-catching 3-ring binder. The 18-year-old distributorship, based in Beverly, Mass., specializes in custom packaging solutions. Approximately 80 percent of its clients are advertising agencies. “They can come to us for anything they need, such as turned-edge binders, CDs, plus the corrugated boxes they go into,” says Michael Zizza, vice president of Graphic Sales Products.

KHJ Integrated Marketing designed a complex binder that Graphic Sales Products was able to offer. It provided 1,000 turned-edge binders with 3/4-inch matte black metal rings. Made from 100 pt. chipboard, the binders were wrapped with Skivertex copper metallic material with a weave embossed texture. (Skivertex is an acrylic-coated, latex-saturated paper often used by publishers and bookbinders.) The binders included a quarter bind of gray Skivertex with a powder finish to wrap the spine and extend three-quarters of the way onto the front of the binders in a custom die cut, angled shape.

The binders utilized extensive decorating techniques. The words “International Place” and “The Chiofaro Company” were foil stamped in silver on the front. Next to that, a 21⁄2-inch circle depicting the office towers was digitally printed on a label and tipped onto the spot where the copper and gray Skivertex materials met. The back of the binders featured the real estate developer’s address and phone numbers in black foil stamping. A striking decoration was a blind heat deboss on the quarter bind that caused the gray material to darken in the image of the office towers.

Trends Presentation Products, a manufacturer in Washington, Mo., handled the printing. “There’s not a lot of companies that could produce this job,” Zizza says. “The ability of Trends to handle the digital printing made them stand out. They could do everything in house.” Graphic Sales Products and its manufacturing partner also had time on their side. “It wasn’t a quick turnaround job,” Zizza says. “We were afforded the time to test the materials and decoration techniques and show the client proofs.”

Providing the advertising agency with ample proofs was critical, Zizza says, because the project’s biggest challenge was “pacifying the designer, bringing what the designer had in his mind’s eye to life.” First, Graphic Sales Products supplied undecorated samples of the Skivertex material to the ad agency to select colors. Next, Trends Presentation Products made prototypes of the decorating dies, including the two foil stamping dies, the blind deboss die, the circular label and the angled quarter bind. Finally, the distributorship showed the ad agency a fully-decorated, one-off preproduction proof.

“Before we completed the order, we had one exact sample of the binder,” Zizza says. “There was no unknown about the binder after the ad agency agreed to the order.” This was key on a project with so many bells and whistles, he says. Throughout the proofing process, the customer tweaked the artwork and made other subtle changes. But when KHJ Integrated Marketing received the binders, which took four weeks to produce, the company was happy.

Graphic Sales Products provides many innovative presentation products to clients. Zizza says it’s not uncommon for companies to spend up to $50 each for high-end binders. The key for distributors, he adds, is to “be able to bring lots of options to the table.” Teaming with Trends Presentation Products allowed Graphic Sales Products to do just that.

—Susan Keen Flynn

Tips

1. Graphic Sales Products, a distributorship in Beverly, Mass., maintains a network of binder and presentation products manufacturers. The company selects manufacturers on a job-by-job basis depending on each client’s particular needs. “If we know a piece is high-profile or needs a fast turnaround, we know exactly where the job has to go,” says Michael Zizza, vice president of Graphic Sales Products.

2. One of the most difficult parts of selling binders and presentation products, Zizza says, is that customers often don’t understand the complexity of the production process. “People see samples on our web site and want to order them,” he says. “But these aren’t commodity products. These binders aren’t pre-made and sitting on our shelves waiting to be foil stamped with the customer’s name.” Sales reps at Graphic Sales Products spend a lot of time educating clients about product constructions and limitations, customer expectations, pricing, turnaround times and more.

3. Graphic Sales Products has produced binders for customers in quantities as low as one or two. A real estate developer requested one binder to hold poster-size aerial view maps of a development site. The binder, which needed to be hand-cut and hand-glued, cost $300. “In smaller quantities, you’ll see outrageous unit prices,” says Zizza.