Seattle Bindery Newsletter: Issue #40. We welcome your comments.


1. USPS ups it again. It’s official- on May 7^th, the US Postal Service Board of Governors voted to overturn a previous decision by the Postal Rate Commission and raise postal rates for a second time this year. The increases are effective July 1st and range from a 3.3% hike for some First Class mail, all the way to 20.3% for the Non-Profit ECR category. Direct mailers have reason to believe that political motives influenced the way the increases were structured this time. While businesses and non-profits bear the brunt of the increases, the 34-cent stamp will be left untouched. Consequently, most Americans will hardly notice a change, shielding the USPS from public outrage over its financial woes.

2. Tip of the Week. The next time you’re submitting a job to be mechanically bound, try printing out the sheets in signatures (such as 16- or 24-page formats). Rather than using single sheet collating to put your book together, our solution for getting faster turnaround is to arrange those signatures as a perfect bound book, and then trim the spine before binding the pages. This method also makes it faster and easier to collate tabs into your book. Just include blank pages on the signatures, where the tabs should go, and we’ll handle the rest.

3. INKorporate this. I’ve always found Printer’s Northwest Trader to be useful in helping me stay on top of developments in the graphic arts industry. Take, for instance, the Technical Tips column on page 10 of the April 2001 issue. Gans Ink & Supply Co. has provided a very comprehensive summary of many of the specialty offset litho inks that are currently available on the market. If it’s been awhile since you last looked to see what’s available, this is a quick and easy way to get up to speed on inks.

4. Peer to peer. An article in last month’s American Printer (www.americanprinter.com) caught my eye: “Peering into Better Business.” I think the idea of peer groups is something worth looking into, particularly since we’re so interconnected these days by the Internet and other advanced telecommunications. Not only are they great networking opportunities, but for small shops, there are cost-effective benefits, too. Besides sharing advice with other members, some groups are also going so far as to share their advertising. Since members aren’t ever competitors in the same market, the group as a whole can go out and hire an ad agency to create one marketing piece, which can then be used by everyone in their individual territories. I use my peer group all the time for management advice and I think it’s great!

5. Mini-marketing. We love these big little folding projects. We just finished folding 700,000 tourism information brochures down to a finished size roughly that of a business card! We’re now setting up our miniature folding equipment to do 350,000 wine bottleneckers, with a finished size of 5 1/4 x 2 7/8 -inches!

 
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email her at judy@seattlebindery.com
Phone 425-656-8210
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