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For success at surfing the shifting sands of today’sprinting market, PacBlue Printing of Vancouver,British Columbia serves as a valuable role model. In

a recent conversation the company’s owners, JonathanColley, President and CEO, and Paul Talbot, VP of Busi-ness Development, describe how they regularly reinventPacBlue, built around toner- and inkjet-based produc-tion, by selectively acquiring new technology and prod-ucts to boost profitability.

“You have to morph yourself to adapt to a changingmarket,” advises Colley. “We’re constantly working tokeep up with technology and add new products andservices with our equipment acquisitions.”

Before Colley’s and Talbot’s professional lives con-verged at PacBlue, neither had ever worked in printing.Colley was an importer of Seiko watches in SouthAfrica until he immigrated to Canada, where he firsttried his hand at the fast-food business. He didn’t like it,and decided instead to purchase a printing companycalled Pacific Blueprinting.

As the name suggests, initially their entire produc-tion consisted of blueprints of construction drawingsfor architects, engineers, and developers. Colley nowlaughs recalling how they first created the blueprints bythe diazo process, using smelly ammonia compounds.

In 1995 a merger with a smaller company broughtthem reprographic capabilities to produce the blueprintson toner and laser devices, along with colour and the ex-pertise they needed to support these new offerings.

Colley recounts: “At that stage, we dug deep into re-searching the colour side of the business, including thedifferent companies that were going to be our com-petitors. Quite a few people had already joined me fromthe company Paul worked at. One of the key elementswe follow in maintaining a good corporate culture isasking our employees for referrals. So I learned a lotabout Paul’s capabilities from my other staff, who even-tually enticed me to have a face-to-face with him.”

Talbot had immigrated to Canada from the United

Kingdom and had built his career on both sides of theAtlantic as a production manager for ad agencies, co-ordinating their outsourced production of everythingfrom radio and TV ads to print collateral. “At PacBlue,we introduced colour management at an early stage,

since colour at its best has always been in theforefront of our brand,” he says.

Colley adds that they have followed thestrategy of growth by merger several timessince, including the addition of signs to theirbusiness in 2007. The company works withOcé LightJet 430 large-format, photo-lasertechnology in order to handle the photo-graphic materials required in graphics forfashion and cosmetics. “In its history, the com-pany has evolved from blueprinting to repro-graphics to small-, large, and grand-formatdigital imaging, and from selling a specificproduct to a certain niche market to selling awide cross-section of merchandise to a widevariety of clients,” he summarizes.

Many of their high-impact projects are doc-umented on PacBlue’s Website, including threerealistic 2/3-scale façades of houses printed oncrezone to showcase a nursery’s landscapingproducts. (Placing young plants around a 2/3-

scale façade yielded the same effect as mature plantingssurrounding a full-sized home.) Colley continues: “Thenice thing is that when clients come in and we takethem on a tour to show them all the different equip-ment and different types of printing we can do, and un-veil samples of their own work reproduced ourequipment, a lot of times they are blown away. We en-courage them to step outside the box by giving themthe message that, when they think of a creative idea,we’ll help them find a way to execute it. Hence our cur-rent slogan: ‘You think it, we’ll print it!’”

DECEMBER 2010 • PRINTACTION • 15

VICTORIA GAITSKELL

PacBlue’sSuccess atReinvention

PacBlue ventured into the signage market in 2007 andnow produces work for fashion and cosmetics.

PacBlue’s Paul Talbot, VP of Business Development, and Jonathan Colley, President and CEO.

Based on the economic realities of today, PacBlue findsitself dealing more directly with real-estate companies.

The early adoption of colour management has allowedPacBlue to secure high-end clients.

Continued on page 30

Capitalizing on changePacBlue presently employs 80 staff, di-vided between two downtown locationsto facilitate quick turnarounds, which forconstruction drawings can amount to aslittle as 30 minutes or an hour, says Tal-bot. “Because of our reputation for fastturnaround in reprographics, clientsthink we can turn around large-formatcolour just as quickly as black-and-whitecopies!”

Colley and Talbot report, that in thelast two years, the decline of real estate inthe Greater Vancouver Area, has alteredtheir product mix. While reprographicsused to account for about 65 percent oftheir business, and still remains signifi-cant, it now represents only 40 percent.They have also seen orders decline formounts on wall and plexiglass panelsthat were once rife in the midst of thecity’s real-estate boom, which lasted foryears until the 2008 economic crash.

As yet, large-format work stands at 43percent of PacBlue’s business, but theysay it is the fastest growing area. Theirother recent gains include the retail mar-ket. “At first we didn’t have a big presencein the retail area, because we were sobusy with the blueprint side of things,”Talbot explains. “Then when weswitched into large format it was mainlythe building-construction industry thatbought it and kept us so busy. We weren’treally reaching out to other areas. Butonce that industry slowed down, westarted concentrating more on the retailmarket. Now it has become one of thefastest growing areas.”

Additionally, Talbot observes that nowthey deal with fewer middlemen: “Clientsused to want the prestige of having an adagency, but all that’s changed now. Nowit’s harder for agencies to do anythingmore than just the creative, and theydon’t have as much work going throughproduction.

“Through research, we discovered thatpeople’s recognition of the namePacBlue was good, but they didn’t con-nect it with what we currently do,” explains Colley. So in 2009 the companyretained Hot Tomali CommunicationsInc. to help reposition them from a re-prographics company to a high-impact,high-quality toner-based printer.

The process resulted in an updatedlogo and Website, and a blitz of giant-sized business cards, dropped off at se-lected targets to introduce PacBlue aslarge-format printing specialists. In Oc-tober 2010, they hired Nicolas Slobinskyas Marketing Communications Manager,whose auspices include a corporate blogwith a scan-of-the-week contest in whichparticipants must identify an objectshown in an extreme close-up view thatshowcases PacBlue’s powerful Cruse scan-ner. Slobinsky also oversees Facebook

GaitskellContinued from page 15

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pages and Twitter tweets documentingsuch occurrences as the lunch-hoursnowball fight that PacBlue organizedone November Thursday to mark Van-couver’s uncharacteristically large snow-fall that week.

Conquering challengesAmong their challenges, Colley and Tal-bot cite issues raised by their competi-tion: “Like everyone else working at thistime, we’re under economic pressure be-cause customers are looking for a betterprice if they can get it. Pricing is a hugeproblem – especially for companies ofour size with high overhead, and espe-cially for large format on the West Coast,where we’re competing with a lot ofsmall mom-and-pop operations thatcome and go frequently, and tend todrive prices down,” says Colley.

This year, for the first time, the part-ners will keep PacBlue open for businessover the Christmas holidays, formerly amandatory vacation period for staff.“We’ve learned that a number of ourcompetitors will be open; so we’ve de-cided to push the fact out to clients thatwe’ll also be open to service them, andsee how it pans out,” says Talbot.

Colley also describes how their com-pany continually strives to monitor andimprove efficiencies to keep costs down.But in the near future, printers may realize fewer savings from this type ofapproach than were possible in flushertimes.

Back in 2008, for instance, it was feasi-ble for News International, a Britishnewspaper publisher owned by RupertMurdoch’s News Corporation, to openthe world’s biggest newspaper plant inBroxbourne, Hertfordshire. Costing£187MM, the new facility churned out86,000 papers an hour on each of 12state-of-the-art presses, versus the 30,000papers per hour formerly produced atthe company’s Wapping operation inEast London. It also employed only 200operators versus the 600 formerly on thecompany’s Wapping payroll.

During a late-November keynotespeech, at Print World 2010 in Toronto,entitled Where is the Printing IndustryHeaded, pundit Frank Romano forecastthat things will no longer work that way.Romano agreed that, just as happened inEngland, printers could formerly makestaff cuts to justify buying technology toincrease productivity. But now, two yearsand a recession later, when most printingcompanies are squeaking by with the low-est staff counts in decades, Romano be-lieves further staff cuts are far less feasiblebecause they entail cutting below bone.

Consequently, Romano concludes thatthe best way left for printers to build theirrevenue is to find new kinds of printingthat customers are willing to purchase ata premium. It’s still a good time to investin equipment, he says, but only so long asthe equipment does something new andunique that customers value and will paymore money for.

Colley and Talbot confirm they are al-ready planning initiatives along theselines that will revise their approach tothe market yet again in 2011.

Victoria Gaitskell is keen to exchange ideaswith readers at victoria@printaction.com

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