Listen Here: (3 min)
Do you have clients that send out hundreds of thousands or even millions of documents every month? These products aren’t being printed on sheets like most business forms and labels that distributors sell. They are printed on giant rolls set on an unwinder at the front of a high-speed (often inkjet) press. This way, the press can run millions of documents nonstop.
What are some of the products sold in jumbo rolls? While this isn’t an exhaustive list, here are some of the more common ones:
- Financial statements
- Statement transactions
- Invoices
- Utility bills
- Checks
- Preprinted shells for variable overprinting
- Promotional inserts
Who Uses Jumbo Rolls?
Jumbo roll applications aren’t commonly sold by most distributors. However, if you can break into this market, selling jumbo rolls can be a great opportunity and profit long-term profits.
Jumbo rolls are primarily used in the statement processing and direct mail spaces, typically printed in-house by companies with their own high-speed inkjet presses. In most cases, these companies are buying blank jumbo rolls directly from the mill. This is because, on a web press, they can print at extremely high volumes very, very cost-effectively, far more cost-effectively than they can on a digital or sheetfed offset press.
So how do you break into this market? Generally, it happens when the end customer is already printing jumbo rolls and has a problem they can’t solve on their own. They can’t hit the color, for example, or the logo doesn’t look good. Perhaps they can’t run the desired configurations, such as certain perfs they might need.
One Real-Life Example
While distributors might wonder, how often does this really happen? The answer is, “Often enough!” One of those times was a little over a year ago when one of our distributor customers lost a large jumbo roll application that had transitioned to blank white paper and the entire job was printed high-speed inkjet in-house. Rather than give up on the account, however, the distributor worked closely with us to uncover new applications to replace the lost revenue.
Ultimately, the distributor won the account (a large financial institution) because the company needed a fast turnaround of a proxy statement that had to be in the mail by the end of the month. We had to turn around three to four truckloads of printed jumbo roll product in less than two weeks! That situation really built trust between the distributor and the customer. Since that time, the distributor has gotten deeper into the account. It wasn’t easy, but ultimately, pushing through that difficult application paid off.
Want to see if there might be a jumbo roll opportunity in your future? Contact your RSM!
Learn more about selling jumbo rolls in our next post!
