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Printing Industry Exchange (printindustry.com) is pleased to have Steven Waxman writing and managing the Printing Industry Blog. As a printing consultant, Steven teaches corporations how to save money buying printing, brokers printing services, and teaches prepress techniques. Steven has been in the printing industry for thirty-three years working as a writer, editor, print buyer, photographer, graphic designer, art director, and production manager.

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Commercial Printing: Thoughts on High-end Shopping Bags

Photo purchased from … www.depositphotos.com

Since Mother’s Day is coming up, my fiancee and I recently stopped at the grocery store to look for Mother’s Day cards. We have a number of mothers in the family and don’t want to leave anyone out.

Needless to say, we were surprised to find that relatively mediocre cards were priced at $10.00 to $14.00 each. Perhaps if they had been unique, we would have been more enthusiastic.

But what we did find was a high-end shopping bag (not a grocery bag but a gift bag) with a message of love in hot-stamped foil. So we bought one for each mother in the family. We will add potted plants to the gift as well.

High-end Shopping Bags

High-end shopping bags are very effective marketing tools because they are often well-crafted and almost always conspicuously branded. Moreover, they usually get reused repeatedly. Each time you see one through its usable lifetime, you are reminded of the initial positive experience, and you see again all the quality production details of the bag.

Here are some of these details.

  1. The bags my fiancee bought were printed on a thick cover stock. Using my printer’s caliper, I see that the paper mics to 10 pt. So it is about as thick as a print book paper cover. This alone gives the bag a sense of substance and durability.
  2. Like shopping bags from high-fashion clothing stores, this bag has a turned edge around the top. That is, the paper is folded back over, such that the bag is far more durable at the opening by being double-thick paper. And beyond durability, it just feels impressive.
  3. There are four holes drilled at the opening of the bag through which two rope handles have been looped and tied off. They are a thick, intensely colored red and are made of two strands of fabric twisted together. Very festive. They look like a Christmas decoration.
  4. The paper from which the bag has been crafted appears to be a dull coated stock, perhaps with a dull laminate or aqueous coating. With no gloss sheen whatsoever, the coating absorbs the light like a sponge.
  5. The commercial printing supplier has painted the sheet with an intense red ink. (This bag actually would be very appropriate for the winter holidays as well as a birthday or any other time. (“Painting the sheet” is a commercial printing term that means flooding the custom printing paper with a thick coating of ink. Again, this screams opulence.)
  6. On the front panel of the bag, the designer has created a large, square design of hand-drawn words of love in German, French, Spanish, English, and I believe Italian, all different ways to say, “I love you.”
  7. The printer has rendered this hand-drawn love-fest in a bright gold hot-stamped foil. The contrast between the deep red and the bright gold again projects a sense of opulence.
  8. Inside the bag, the converter included a rectangle of thick cardboard glued to the bottom of the bag for reinforcement and to keep the bag from tearing open while carrying something heavy. This detail adds to the overall sense of quality.
  9. The interior walls of the bag have also been printed in a light red geometric pattern on the bright white of the paper. This is a nice, airy counterpoint to the heavy ink coverage and gold foil on the outer walls of the bag. However, it also shows an attention to detail.
  10. There is a small round-cornered tag affixed to the rope handle with one side printed in bright red and one side left blank, so the giver of the gift can add a handwritten note. Small details like this add to the overall sense of quality.
  11. The personal touch of the handwritten words of love from which the gold foil stamping was rendered makes this an intimate gift bag. Commercial typescript without the accompanying doodles and flourishes would not have been as personal.
  12. The nature of the message is “evergreen.” This is a marketing term that means it can be appropriate forever at any time. It is not tied to one holiday. It can be used for Valentine’s Day, a birthday, or just a surprise.

Considerations in Designing and Printing High-end Shopping Bags

My fiancee’s high-end shopping bag, purchased for her daughter and daughter-in-law as part of their Mother’s Day gifts, exemplifies the best of utility, design, communication, and promotion. With this in mind I would encourage you to check out similar shopping bags at clothing stores and related places of business.

You might even want to look closely at high-end shoe boxes, which include similar production values, such as multiple layers of paper (in this case usually laid over chipboard), and the use of embossing, foil stamping, and dull and gloss paper coatings.

In both cases (shopping bags and shoe boxes), you will see that a lot of money has been spent to sell a product. This is not unusual or unreasonable when you consider that marketing, promotion, and advertising are not an expense but an investment in the public’s view of the brand.

Nevertheless, in this light, if you are tasked with producing shopping bags at this level of quality, I would encourage you to research specialty printers that focus on this work. The more they know about the process, the better. And in addition, these shopping bags require specialized equipment. The more of this equipment that is on-site at your printer (i.e., thus avoiding outsourcing), the better your overall price will be and the tighter your printer’s schedule will be.

Personally, I would start the search for such a printer online (the Printing Industry Exchange website plus online searches), but I would go further and ask your trusted commercial printing suppliers for referrals. They will know from their experience whom to trust with specialty work. (Personally, I might consider asking a commercial printer that specializes in marketing promotions. If they can’t do it, they might have a trusted source to recommend.)

Who Can Produce These Shopping Bags?

With this in mind, and based on the shopping bags my fiancee purchased, you would need access to the following equipment:

  1. Offset presses, of course, but specifically large offset presses that can print heavy-coverage ink without any mottling (i.e., a thick and even ink coating). This also requires a skilled press operator.
  2. Hot foil stamping equipment. This will require a metal die. Metal dies, in my experience, range in price (based on size and complexity) from about $200 to $500. This is in addition to the cost of the hot foil stamping work.
  3. A drill press to make the holes through which the rope handles for the shopping bag will be looped.
  4. Presumably a flat shopping-bag blank is converted (assembled) from a printed and UV- (or aqueous-) coated press sheet into the three-dimensional form of an open shopping bag. The custom printing supplier you choose needs to be skilled in this complex work. So always request printed samples.
  5. Keep in mind that the elements of such a bag are expensive to produce. The shopping bags my fiancee purchased were just under $7.00 each (far less than the holiday cards, and larger and more useful as well). To reach this price point, however (and assuming a large profit margin), requires producing quite a long press run of the shopping bag. If you are only doing a limited press run, you may want to talk with your printer about digital printing options. Each bag will cost a lot more than an offset printed product, but the overall print run cost may be less (due to the technology) than for offset.
  6. If you’re producing a high-end shopping bag like this for your business or a client, remember that such a product can deliver a lot on the marketing or promotional level. It is a useful product, so the end-user will probably incorporate it into their life for a while, just as my fiancee and I reuse specialty bags again and again. Each time, if your creative department has emblazoned the shopping bag with your logo and other elements of your brand, you will be reinforcing these in the mind of the end-user. And that’s priceless advertising.

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