The Digital Trade Printer

Back in the day, trade printers would gang printed jobs in full color from a number of small commercial printers onto one large sheet. This cut cost and allowed small printers to offer color-printed jobs to their customers. In many cases, these trade printers were also called gang printers. They advertised extensively in industry trade publications.

This was in the day when most small printers had black and white offset duplicators and 4-up or large color presses were beyond their reach. Full-color printing required color separations, exacting pre-press and highly skilled staff. Small and quick printers had high school kids. 

Color printing on an offset duplicator often consisted of a Townsend T-Head which could print a spot color. It was not until the advent of the digital color printer in 1993 that color printing was generally available. It then took a while for the equipment to become affordable to the small and medium printing company. Today, almost every printer offers full-color production printing routinely. And offset duplicators are now in museums.

Enter HPG. Harvard Pinnacle Group in Waltham, Mass. is a digital trade printer. They began in Harvard, Mass. on Pinnacle Road and hence the name. There is no connection to the Crimson Tide. Owner Greg Wallace started the company as a Macintosh training center, and his need for training materials moved him into printing. The company was born digital and has stayed digital.

The HPG equipment complement consists of six digital printers and 14 finishing systems. Those digital printers include Oki, Konica Minolta and Xerox Iridesse. There are no direct or end user customers. HPG only prints for the trade and sells to the trade. Its customers are other printers.

Why is there still a need for the trade printer? Certainly, every small or quick printer already has a digital printing device or two or more. Perhaps one is black and white and the other is full color. But there is a bewildering variety of systems out there, with extended gamut capability, special spot colors, a variety of finishing options and much more. Let us not forget that there are still trade printers with 6-color or more offset presses. 

Way back when, I did a consulting gig for a New England business forms company. We ganged a gazillion business cards on the film output from an CRT phototypesetter so as to burn one plate. Some of the early online printing services began as gang printers by organizing multiple jobs on one large sheet. Today, short runs are the norm, and digital printing is the right technology at the right time.

The trade printer is an extension of another printer’s business. Trade printers stay on top of the technology and thus allow the small printer (or any size printer) to offer new services without committing to new equipment. 

I once read “Pierre DuPont and the Making of the Modern Corporation” and learned that a company can apply a buy rather than make approach. This negates large investments in capability until the amount of outside purchases reaches critical mass. Then the company can make the investment in equipment or infrastructure. Trade printers let you build a business and then invest in new capacity when the revenue justifies it.

The HPG finishing equipment is even more interesting. HPG acts as a dealer for Duplo and Challenge which makes the Waltham facility both a production hub and a demonstration center. HPG’s business today is about half and half, digital trade printing and finishing equipment sales.

“Many dealers do not have the equipment they sell in their demo rooms, so they are selling by using the data and spec sheets," Wallace said. "HPG uses the equipment it sells in our Digital Print Production Center for actual production jobs that we get from printers, brokers and trade companies.” 

Dealers usually use their equipment vendors to demo equipment or have “canned” demonstrations. HPG welcomes having potential clients use actual production jobs to test finishing equipment. And the HPG Digital Print Production Center also acts as a production backup for their customers. They know what works, what doesn’t work and how to make it work.

Equipment never breaks until you use it. Sometimes HPG customers are in the middle of a production job that they can’t finish until their equipment is fixed. HPG has a “We've Got Your Back” service program where they invite clients to come into the Digital Print Production Center to use the HPG facility or send their job and HPG will finish it for them.

The variety of HPG work is staggering. Displays throughout the building show printing on almost every substrate, with special effects that draw attention. From small brochures to giant signs, HPG stays on top of the technology to meet its customers’—and by extension their customers’—needs.

Innovation is never just about technology. It is about meeting the needs of end users, who do not always know what their needs are. It is only when they see gold or silver on a sheet, or special coatings, or other effects that they realize that their marketing needs it. Marketing, after all, is about getting attention.

“It’s the value-add that matters,” Wallace said.

HPG can add foiling, gold/silver imprinting and other special effects. And these features get attention.

More importantly, workflow matters. HPG operates with a small contingent of staff, and this is possible because of workflow approaches that facilitate a high level of automation.

The fact that HPG is also an equipment supplier is different from other printing industry models. As both a service and a supplier, it seems better able to weather the vagaries of the pandemic. Selecting finishing equipment as a dealer focus also made sense. We do not really sell printing. We sell paper in the form of flyers, brochures, booklets, books, etc. and these products are used by marketers to inform and persuade some audience. 

As communication and marketing evolve, the printing service as we know it will evolve. There will be a need for new thinking as we move into the future. HPG Print is one example of that future.