Online print has come a long way. The tools are slick, the turnaround times are fast, and the prices are hard to argue with on a spreadsheet. We understand why product businesses use them — especially when they’re just starting out or keeping a close eye on costs. But there’s a cost that doesn’t appear on the quote. And in our experience, most businesses only find out what it is after something has gone wrong.
What you’re actually buying when you go online.
Online printers are built for volume and efficiency. Your job goes into a system, gets processed alongside thousands of others, and comes out the other end. That works well for straightforward, commodity print. It works less well for packaging. Packaging involves decisions — about board weight, finish, die-line, crease position, print sequence. These things matter, and they interact with each other in ways that only become obvious when a physical box is in your hands. An automated online system doesn’t catch those issues. It just runs the file you uploaded.
The problems we see most often.
Colour drift is the most common. Your brand has a specific shade — a deep navy, a warm terracotta, a precise Pantone — and it comes back slightly off. Not wildly wrong, but not in tolerance either. Then there’s structure. A crease that’s a millimetre out of position means a box that doesn’t fold cleanly. A foil that hasn’t been set up correctly for the board looks flat rather than lustrous. A glue line that’s slightly off means a box that doesn’t hold its shape on shelf. None of these things are catastrophic in isolation. But they compound. And when you’re trying to get product onto shelves or into customers’ hands, they cost you time, money, and sometimes the stock itself.
The bit that’s hardest to put a number on.
When something goes wrong with an online order, there’s no one to call. There’s a support email, maybe a chat window, possibly a returns process. What there isn’t is a person who looked at your job before it went on press, who knows what you were trying to achieve, and who can tell you exactly what happened and what they’re going to do about it. That’s the real hidden cost. Not just the reprint — the time you’ve spent, the launch that’s slipped, the stock that can’t be used, and the energy that goes into chasing a resolution from a supplier who processes thousands of jobs a day and doesn’t know yours from anyone else’s.
What a proper print partner looks like.
We’ve been making packaging since 1980. When a job comes in, a person looks at it — checks the die-line, checks the colours, checks that what’s been asked for is achievable and that the file is set up to deliver it. If something’s not right, we say so before the job goes on press, not after. Because we do everything in-house — design, print, foiling, embossing, die-cutting, gluing — there’s no passing the job between suppliers and no one to blame when it goes wrong. It either comes out right or we sort it. That’s what you’re paying for. If you’ve had a frustrating experience with an online printer and want to understand what a different kind of working relationship looks like, we’re happy to have that conversation.
Call us on 01963 250920 or get in touch