Durst has just announced that retail giant Debenhams has invested a further £1.1m in new wide-format print systems – see story here.
The concern for some – and particularly the display print specialists who service the larger retail chains – is that this could lead to an increase in the number of retailers considering similar moves towards in-house printing. Of course many retailers have long had their own in-house print facilities, but this has most often been on smaller format print. Large scale signage and wide-format retail display has more usually been farmed out to the perceived specialists – and some PSPs have built a business on that fact.
However, the simple truth is that wide-format digital print is getting easy. Today, digital printing systems from leading brand such as Canon, Epson, HP, Mimaki, Roland DG and others are not that different to desktop home and office printers with regards to their ease-of-use. Even the ‘black arts’ of colour management and profiling are now being handled on-the-fly and in the background by printers such as the HP Latex 360.
Of course once any retailer brings this relatively simplistic roll-to-roll poster printing in-house, then the countdown has also begun to a future when they’ll look towards higher end equipment printing on to rigid media and other materials or applications previously deemed ‘specialist’.
Even before this news from Debenhams, the ‘in-house or out-source’ question will already have been a discussion point in retail boardrooms around the country. Yesterday’s news – which will undoubtedly be reported in publications covering a wide gamut of markets including printing, retailing, marketing, shop-fitting, business and more – is going to increase awareness, and consequently the number of people having this self-same conversation.
Signage and retail display has long been a subbed-out service for most retailers. The possibility of a new trend towards bringing more and more of it in-house is one that might be causing a number of heavily-invested PSPs some sleepless nights.
