Fresh Perspectives: "I Thought Print was Dying... I Couldn't Have Been More Wrong"

"Isn’t print just brochures, flyers and magazines?" Like many, I had a completely misguided view of the print industry before I joined it. I saw it as a fading industry, lumped in with DVDs and landline phones, a victim to the rise of digital media.

The truth is, print isn’t dying, it’s actually a giant industry, thriving in ways I never expected.

My First Day in Print - The Front Doors of Drupa

I began to realise that print certainly isn’t dying the moment I stepped into drupa’s main conference hall in June 2024, (which happened to be my first day on the job). That day, I quickly realised print might just be one of the most vast and misunderstood industries out there.

While at drupa, I shared some of my initial thoughts on print with my colleague Nate Duckworth while in one of the halls. In response, he perfectly captured the essential role of the print industry – “Imagine stepping into a Tesco.” From the moment you enter to the moment you leave, print quietly shapes your entire shopping experience, from packaging, banners, uniforms, to floor graphics.

This set off a chain reaction in my head as to how vast print actually is. It's everywhere.
I now challenge people to try and name an industry untouched by print in a big way. It’s nearly impossible.

In some cases, the box itself costs more to produce than the food inside. That alone speaks volumes about the power and value of print

To put it in numbers, the British Printing Industries Federation (BPIF) says the global print market is worth over £700bn. That’s nearly twice the size of the gaming, music, and movie industries combined. The UK is in no way sheltered from this, being the fifth-largest producer of printed products in the world, responsible for employing nearly 100,000 people.

It May be Big, But is Print Not on the Decline?

“The print industry must be fading – after all, we live in a world of e-books, online news, and paperless offices’’, something I probably said in the past. Shock, I was wrong again.

Once I began to grasp the sheer scale of print, it became clear that print was actually a growing industry which is taking on a brand-new form.

The numbers don’t lie. The UK commercial print industry is growing year after year, and will continue to grow into 2030, with digital print being the fastest-growing sector. To make this even more convincing, the print industry exceeded growth estimates anticipated between 2014 to 2019, and then again between 2019 to 2024. Not bad for a “fading” industry.

Unlike the predictions for most manufacturing industries in the UK, the future looks bright for print.
Ultimately the boom in ecommerce has caused some notable changes in the way people buy print, and what customers now expect as a bare minimum during their experience buying printed products.

From the printing companies I’ve spoken to in the past seven months, these are the biggest shifts shaping the industry:

• More customers making smaller orders. While demand for print is growing, order sizes on average are shrinking.
• A rise of DIY design. With access to affordable, easy-to-navigate design tools and pre-built templates, more customers are designing their own artwork.
• Speed is everything. A 2024 survey found that nearly two-thirds of online shoppers expect delivery on their orders within 24 to 48 hours.

So, what separates struggling and thriving printing companies? From the 700 printing companies I’ve spoken to in the last seven months, the biggest correlation I see is many struggling businesses are still running in the same way they did ten to 20 years ago. A complaint I often hear is how difficult it is to make the shifting customer demand towards smaller order volumes profitable, particularly at scale.

From the 700 printing companies I've spoken to in the last seven months, the biggest correlation I see is many struggling businesses are still running in the same way they did ten to 20 years ago.

As a result, many printers are forced to pass jobs to competitors, handing them a potential long-term customer (a micro-£30 business card order, for example, can quickly turn into a long-term client worth thousands of pounds with a good first experience).

What hasn’t helped is that the automation tools available on the market that help make small orders viable were previously limited to the biggest companies in the industry. With new technology, small orders have become profitable for printing companies of all sizes.

The high costs associated with licencing fees and developers and consultants to build complex workflows managed by a select few team members have created high barriers to entry.

That’s why we created Artworker, to make pre-press automation accessible for printers of all sizes by building simple, affordable, cloud-based software.

Our goal is to allow you to go from artwork upload to print without any manual intervention for the majority of jobs, making even micro-orders profitable.

Personally, I’m highly optimistic about the future of print, and think everyone, no matter their size, should be too.

The opportunity to thrive in this period of change is wide open for any company that positions itself to seize it.

As in any rapidly evolving industry, it's the early adopters of new technology who gain a first-mover advantage, and in an industry as abundant as print, that advantage is well worth seizing.