Sell the one thing your press cannot do

The difference you are selling

A handwriting font on a digital press produces an image of handwriting: uniform ink density, identical letterforms repeating down the run, sitting on the surface of the sheet. A pen produces variable pressure, ink absorbed into the fibres, and letterforms that differ every time.

Most recipients could not describe the difference. Most of them notice it anyway, because the envelope in their hand either looks like it came from a person or it does not - and that judgement happens before anything is read.

Why a customer pays for it

These are United States figures, self-reported by the marketers who ran the campaigns, and there is no equivalent Australian series. Treat them as the shape of the thing rather than a forecast of your result - the honest use is to compare channels and list types against each other, not to predict a number for your campaign.

The honest framing for a print customer is narrower than that table suggests. Those figures are for direct mail as a channel, not for handwriting, and we are careful about the difference. What you are selling is the odds of the envelope being opened rather than sorted into the windowed pile - which is a real thing to sell, and a smaller claim than a percentage lift.

Where it fits your existing work

• Event and wedding stationery. You print the invitation; the envelope gets addressed by hand. It is the natural upsell and the one customers raise unprompted.
• Business thank-you and welcome cards. The same customers who already buy letterhead and compliment slips from you, buying a card that gets kept.
• Small direct mail runs for customers too small for a mail house but too big to write themselves - the hundred-to-two-thousand range that falls between the two.

How the arrangement runs

• You quote the customer. Trade pricing below the published rates here, and your margin is your business.
• Stock is yours - printed by you, bought by you, or supplied by the customer.
• Data as a spreadsheet, one row per piece.
• Sign-off before the run, with a written sample where the job warrants it.
• Finished work returns to you for delivery or lodgement.

The honest caveat

We are a young business. If you are putting your shop’s name on the finished job, you are taking on our reliability as well as your own, and you should ask us exactly where we are up to before you do. Start with one job you can afford to have go slowly rather than a customer you cannot afford to lose.

The calculator shows the published rates for any combination, so you can sanity-check a margin before you ring us.