Success with synthetics

For a half-century, Precision Offset Printing Company's bread and butter has been printing on plastic and synthetic materials, mostly for the education market. Even in the brave new era of networked projectors and PowerPoint presentations, the company has enjoyed healthy profits by printing countless transparencies for overhead projectors and overlays for school textbooks. Its niche, however, shrinks with each passing year.

Recently, the Leesport, Pa.-based printer decided to explore the sales potential in the commercial marketplace for printing on synthetics. With that in mind, Precision Offset created a 24-page, all-synthetic promotional brochure called "America: The Land I Love," which features images and text printed on eye-catching transparencies and Yupo synthetic paper.

The brochure offers a nostalgic perspective, and celebrates the simple pleasures of baseball, childhood, home cooking, and music. With the exception of its center pages, every other page in "America: The Land I Love" is made of vinyl or polyester, with text and photographs printed on one or both sides of the transparent surfaces.

Designed by Van Quire Studios, Hamburg, Pa., "America: The Land I Love" was produced direct-to-plate in Precision Offset's prepress department on a Creo Lotem thermal platesetter.

The project's biggest printing challenge for Precision Offset was "attaining the level of quality and exactness we demand, while using a UV press that was new to us," says operations manager Rich Yerkes.

He adds, "Some of the first runs were not acceptable, and we would redo the pages until they were right."

Precision Offset printed 5,000 copies of the 11x6½" brochure on a Heidelberg CD 102 40" sheetfed press. Most pages were printed four-color process, with the occasional use of six-color, using Toyo inks. The transparent pages include a 0.0065 scuff-resistant vinyl cover overlay, and 0.003 polyester clear overlays inside, plus a grommet-mounted wheel printed on 0.0075 white vinyl.

For the non-transparent pages, Precision Offset selected Yupo 74-lb. cover stock and 68-lb. text. "The Yupo pages have a really rich look," says Yerkes. "Designers love them."

Precision Offset has distributed "America: The Land I Love" to advertising agencies, customers, and plastics manufacturers. "The response has been excellent," says Yerkes. "The brochure came out in a down economy, but people love the piece. When the economy turns around, I think business will explode."

Precision Offset is reprinting the brochure and, based on the positive response it has received, is developing a calendar with synthetic pages.

Also pleased with the brochure is Yupo Corporation America, Chesapeake, Va., which is distributing several hundred copies to existing and potential customers.

"The brochure shows off the capabilities of a high-end, quality printer who works with synthetics," says Paul Mitcham, Yupo's national marketing director. "For this application, our paper was a perfect fit."