Have you ever thought of your business in terms of products? I am doing some interesting reading about the current digital revolution in manufacturing, and it struck me that printing is usually supplementary to a product as opposed to being a product itself. There are many types of printing that are thought of as the “thing”. Books, newspapers and magazines are just a few, though even these exist outside of their medium. A book on a Kindle is still a book. This is to say that a book is much less “thing like” than a spoon. What does that mean to our industry? Why is this insight important?
Manufacturing, typically thought of as rigid and slow to change is undergoing tremendous change by way of the “maker’s revolution”. We are entering an era of digital desktop fabrication. The 3D printer is becoming to the world of things what the Apple Laserwriter and Postscript were to publishing. Inventors and entrepreneurs gather in online communities. This in turn increases the speed of product innovation tenfold. In addition to meeting digitally, fabrication labs where people can go to create prototypes and small batches of products are popping up all over the country. This is changing not only how we’re making things, but what we are making and who is making it. For most printers this is an all new breed of consumer. Perhaps you have had a client who made a widget in their basement and came to you for some business cards or labels to legitimize the thing as a product and themselves as a company. This gang of tinkerers is not likely looking super attractive to you as a pool of prospects. In fact it is likely that today that client would use small desktop devices to fulfill their printing needs. However, something very different can happen today. Thanks to creative funding models like Kickstarter, that same inventor can have a first time order of 1000 widgets or maybe even more. Now we should be paying close attention.
Of course small batches of “think tank”-developed products are a speck of dust when compared to all of the mass produced things that are a part of our daily lives. Nonetheless this shift has significant implications. Printers have the opportunity to partner with companies who have pre-orders in the thousands for products they have not even manufactured yet! These companies have a tremendous buy-in from the communities that create them and it’s important to be a part of that solution. Have you thought about the technology and processes that you can use to attract this lively bunch. We hope you have the opportunity to visit Graph Expo and perhaps think of things you see there through the maker’s lens.