Start Your Printing Business With These 5 Types Of Equipment

Although, the face of marketing and advertisement has been changed tremendously with the internet revolution, booming information technology and far-reaching social media, the effect that physical marketing in the form of posters, banners and photo prints can have on the consumers cannot be underestimated. 

With manufacturers continuously launching advanced printing machines in a plethora of designs, models and features, there has been a steep fall in their prices due to cut-throat competition.

So, if at all you are inclined towards marketing via print media, you can start your own printing business with these 5 primary pieces of equipment:

1. Printers: These will be your first and foremost equipment required to do the job. For small scale orders and standard size documents, you have plenty of options in professional-grade laser and inkjet printers. They are quite affordable and offer the much-needed flexibility in terms of printing.

Then there are wide-format printers if you want to go big with printing banners and posters.

You can expand the variety of your services and widen the range of your clients by installing a garment printer. Printing photos, designs and patterns on fabric is also a booming trend and has good market demand.

There is another choice if the budget is not a constraint. Commercial grade offset printing press for large scales print volumes like magazines or newspapers.

2. Laminator: Keeping laminating machine will work as an added benefit and business opportunity. For example, there might be a company planning on issuing new ID cards to its employees. Then they will likely want the ID cards to be laminated. Another example could be a customer with a bulk order of laminating photographs including passport photos because laminating increase the life and durability of the paper. So keeping a laminating machine is a good way of generating some extra revenue without having to invest much in capital and space both.

3. Cutting System: A printing business is incomplete without installing a cutting machine. Sheets of paper are required for printing anything from business cards, booklets, or flyers. Initially, you may invest in getting a manual cutting machine. Later, when your business starts running well, depending on the kind of orders you receive, you can choose to upgrade from a manual to semi-automatic or fully automatic cutting machine.

4. Computer and Graphic Design Software: Graphic design is the backbone of any printing business. This is because whatever design or photo prints need to be printed, first has to be created or at least improvised with the help of a high-end computer.

Talking about the configuration of a high-end computer, it must have a high performing graphics card for which Nvidia is ruling the people’s choice. Then a big amount of RAM will be required to get an optimum speed.  And to support this high configuration, a powerful CPU is needed to get speedy processing.

Adobe is known to be the standard best graphic design software. A subscription is required to get the latest version of the software which is quite expensive.

And, if you are not ready to spend much in the beginning, there are other open-source alternatives.

5. Binding equipment: If you want to extend the printing services, then you can get a binding machine and offer binding services too. However, it is not a piece of necessary equipment. You can go for 3 kinds of binders:

● Comb binder

● Wire binder

● Thermal binder.

The first two options are more towards the economical side. They don’t need much capital and space and will cater to most of the binding requests. However, if you want to offer high-end binding services, you can keep thermal binders and charge accordingly.

Equipment is a vital requirement to start a business in any niche even if it is as small as printing passport photos. While venturing into a printing business, make sure to conduct extensive research about the market of printing in your area and look for the best equipment that you can acquire in your initial budget. Quality equipment will always give you quality results and thus will bring good business.