Here at The Inside we have been custom printing for around 15 years. What a journey. There is so much we have learnt and improved on as time has gone by.
The first and most important rule we have implemented from experience is we do ALL custom work via email - no exception. Why?
Every single change, proof or comment gets copied and pasted and put into your sales record.
Your sales record will look something like this on our end. As there is a lot to discuss with the printers for custom prints - our printers can access these files too so when it coms to print time they can read all the notes to ensure your project looks the best it can.
Some of our artists live in our home base of Nelson but work remotely - not in our store/warehouse. Some of our artists live in Australia, China and the UK. They all have different skills and are suited for different jobs. We even have a cartographer based in the Ukraine whose map making skill is excellent. But if you need changes she is probably not he person to do it. She creates maps but doesn't edit them. If you need colour changes we would send that to our Photoshop expert. If you need place names or cities added or resized then that would go back to the cartographer to be changed and accurate. Many of these processes involve multiple people working in different time zones and languages. This is why we need everything recorded in one file.
We did trial using the telephone at one point. But all conversations, address changes, colour requests, size changes and/or additions need to be put in your file and this is where errors can occur. By emailing any new information we can copy and past and put it into one file where multiple people can access it from one master copy.
We have had customers take up to a year to make changes - by which time they and we have forgotten all of the requests. We have had customers call multiple times a day to make multiple changes. It just didn't work. To ensure everyone involved in the custom printing process is well versed in your project we require every single change to be made via email.
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