Spot-Nordic is delighted to announce the launch of a new initiative we call Spot Pay & Play, aimed at enabling even small and medium sized print shops the best equipment available in the market to ensure top quality, maximum consistency and speed of production.

Top equipment typically costs and arm and a leg. This is just how it is and everyone knows this.

Until now, this has meant that only the bigger print shops have had the financial capacity to constantly invest in the best solutions in the market, while small to medium print shops have settled with using older solutions, good enough to keep the presses rolling but nothing more than that.

The gap between the best and the biggest print shops and small to medium print shops has unfortunately been growing in past years and decades, following increased requirements of customers for standardization in print, which is why we see more and more small to medium print shops either closing shop, or merging with bigger print shops.

This is a trend that we would like to slow down. We remember days when there were many smaller printshops in every town, competing with each other for customers and we miss those days.

The founder and owner of Spot-Nordic, Mr. Ingi Karlsson, an offset printer by profession, with 20 years of working as an offset printer in Iceland, has always been focused on offering only the best solutions in the print and graphics industry aimed at maximizing speed, quality and consistency of printed material and colour in general, since approx. 2003 with special emphasis on process colour (CMYK) printing to ISO standards (Fogra/G7).

Mr. Karlsson holds the first Ugra Certified Expert (UCE) - see www.ugra.ch diploma, - i.e. he is Ugra Certified Expert #1, which he earned in St. Gallen, Switzerland in 2007, trained by the legendary, then Managing Director of Ugra, Mr. Erwin Widmer.

Mr. Karlsson is also the inventor of the Spot Matching System - see www.spotmatchingsystem.com, a colour palette of 5.214 named colours that can be reproduced in CMYK to ISO 12647 standards on both coated and uncoated paper.

Until now, in most cases, small to medium design studios and print shops will browse through our product range, ask for a quote for a solution they are interested in and then decide to wait another year, due to the high cost of the solution.

This may work today and perhaps also tomorrow, but we all know that at some point machines, devices and software must be upgraded or simply replaced.

Automation and printing to international standards is what enables the best and the biggest print shops to offer more speed, more colour accuracy and more consistency than medium or small print shops can - even at lower prices, - because those big print shops print 24/7 so they can afford to lower their margins on certains jobs, while they keep the margins higher on jobs that few others can deliver. That way they can gradually starve their smaller competitors to death, one by one.

This is how it has always been and how it will always be, if we don't change the game.

A trend we have seen in past years and decades is that many companies are having their material printed abroad, which weakens the entire print industry in their country.

The PDF format has made it possible to print books, magazines and basically anything down to business cards in markets where wages and other costs are considerably lower than in the home market.

Huge print plants have been built in low cost markets with cutting edge printing presses and all the latest whistles and bells to maximize productivity through automation, speed and quality.

Print shops that wish to at least try to compete with these giants, toe to toe, must for starters at least match them in regards of speed, quality and consistency.

They may not be able to match their prices due to higher wages and fixed costs in their country - but if other things are even or if they can even provide better quality, a slightly higher price pr. unit could often be justified with the comfort of having someone locally print the job and the comfort of being able to go and have a look at the job on press before and even while it is printed and to make minor adjustments or corrections if need be.

Then there is of course the matter of the CO2e footprint and the customer's consideration for their local or national obligations - to do what they can to strenghten their local printing industry.

But all of this is just idle talk if the print shop cannot match the quality of their competitors, for instance when it comes to printing to international standards, such as the ISO 12647 standard for colour printing - which, as mentioned here above, happens to be a special focus of Spot-Nordic.

Print shops that offer printing of Pantone spot colours also need to be sure that they have the appropriate tools to ensure that their Pantone colours are correctly mixed and printed.

The latest version of the Pantone Matching System makes this more important than ever before, since the target for each Pantone colour is no longer simply the colour you see in your Pantone guide, but the master LAB value of that colour. In order to see that master LAB value, you need to be a subscriber to Pantone Connect Premium, to see those LAB values in software such as Adobe apps, - and printers can also subscribe to Pantone LIVE to be able to pull up the respective Pantone LAB master value for each colour being printed. 

To monitor Pantone colours on press, the printer will need a proper spectrophotometer. An old densitometer will simply not do all by itself. Those days are gone.

 Spot Pay & Play

What we are now offering print shops, - big and small, is to either split payments of our world class solutions down to as much as 24 months - and in some cases we can even offer our solutions on a convenient lease, so they can get the solution they want, lease it for as long as they want and buy it whenever they wish to.

At any time during the lease period, the customer is allowed to buy the product to get out of the lease.

The leasing period is 48 months at the time.

Currently we are offering lease terms on selected products where we even offer our leasing customers to replace their leased devices every 48 months with new ones, with hardware upgrades and service on the instruments included in the lease, which ensures that instruments and machines are always up-to-date.

We believe this may help even the odds for small to medium sized print shops and help them compete with the best, so they too can grow, rather than to settle for being gradually phased out of the market, as technology gets more advanced and demands of customers increase, in regards of standardized and consistent output.

At the same time our lease is a convenient way for bigger print shops to reduce fluctuations in the balance sheet, while always being assured that their printers have the best equipment, kept in service and replaced every 4 years.

At least we hope to help keep print jobs local. Seeing an entire industry die, due to competition from abroad is just about the saddest thing imagineable, - and this is the harsh reality in many countries.

Conditions vary between manufacturers but we can in most cases offer payment terms on machines, devices and software that put these products within reach for small to medium sized print shops and design agencies.

We plan to build on what we have today and gradually we may be able to put together packages for print shops that will enable them to grow, by gradually increasing their speed, quality and consistency, without over extending financially while they grow.

Some of the products we are offering in fact save our customers money and thus they can in fact make money while they are increasing their speed, quality and consistency - even if we don't consider the advantages of building a better reputation that leads to bigger and better customers.

For instance the InkZone ink preset solution we offer has an average ROI of only 2-3 months, while it can save it's owners tens and even hundreds of thousands of Euros each year.

We can offer this solution at terms where the owner easily pays for the solution with his savings, in the form of paper and time saved.

We can also offer TECHKON instruments on lease, as low as EUR 74 pr. month, including service every 2 years and replacement of instrument every 4 years.

Another example of what we can offer our customers is a brand new Cherlyn Pantone Formula Scale on a long term lease at only EUR 90 pr. month, with hardware upgrades included, containing all the new and older Pantone recipes (with both the new base colours and the older base colours).

Please contact info@spot-nordic if you see products on our official website that kindle you interest and let us see what we can do for you.