How to find a local printing company

Where can I find local printing companies?

A lot of people wonder where they can find local printing companies that aren’t part of giant corporations like Staples or FedEx.

That’s why finding a local print shop you can trust to do good work is so important these days. This article is designed to help you find local print shops in your area.

Using local printing companies

The main benefit of local print shops is obviously the proximity to your home or office. You don’t need to drive very far to find a local print shop that can handle your printing and copying projects.

Local print shops also have a variety of different equipment available for their printing. Most small shops won’t be able to handle large print jobs that require lots of customization. Making sure that your local print shop has the capability to handle your print products is tantamount to getting the product you envision.

Use an online printing company as your local print shop!

Instead of messing around with corporate printing companies that don’t provide great service, or won’t deliver a quality product like you need, you should consider an online printing company like Sterling Printing.

With an online printing company, you don’t need to travel anywhere. Simply place your order, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Sterling Printing also offers a Rush Critical shipping option, which allows you to get your print products anywhere in the USA, when you need them, not when a printing company says they’re ready.

Contact Sterling Printing, a Boston area local printing shop

Instead of going with the same, corporate local print shop and not getting the results you need for your printing products, choose a local family owned printing company such as ours.

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DTG PRINTING vs SCREEN PRINTING

We will continue educating our valued customers about one of the many advantages of DTG printing – DTG printing services utilize digital technology. Sterling Printing has recently added the latest Brother's DTG equipment to serve our customers.

• Digital files are generally quicker and easier to edit/modify than analog photographic images.
• There is an increasing use by creative professionals to use digital software, which makes digital processing the logical replacement for optical and manual technology.
• The world of telecommunications has largely converted to digital processing. The same digital files may be utilized for electronic media across the board – the Internet, video, TV, CD-ROMs, print media and multimedia.
• It is easy to convert analog images and text to digital with scanning and optical character reading (OCR) software.
• Digital files are simple and easy to transport and communicate, sending a digital file to any digital printer anywhere in the world within seconds permits quick response printing. 

Here is some basic information about DTG vs Screen Printing

• What is direct to garment printing? It is just putting ink directly onto an item of clothing? What sets it apart from any other form of printing then? 
• 
  Also referred to as DTG and inkjet-to-garment printing, direct to garment printing is the printing of digital images from a computer onto a shirt or other garment through the use of an inkjet printer. And while the name may seem vague, the advantages, disadvantages and ideal uses for DTG are quite specific. Read on to see how it works and whether your project is right for DTG. 
  
  

  Benefits of DTG:

  • No setup costs
  • Allows for small orders to be printed at a reasonable price
  • Can print extremely detailed images
  • Does not charge by the color, making full-color printing affordable
  • Ink binds directly to fibers so it feels more like it's part of the fabric

  Printing Jobs DTG Is Used For:

  • Low quantities
  • Detailed designs with gradients, shading, or many colors
  
  

  How it Works

  DTG is less complicated that you'd expect given that it can capture complicated images so accurately on something as soft as a shirt or sweater. The best way to think of DTG is like at-home printing from your computer, except that the paper is replaced with a shirt. Like your at-home printer, DTG printers do not need to be set up for individual jobs and can render millions of colors. Some DTG printers are even manufactured by companies that make standard inkjet printers (like Anajet, Brother and Epson), but are simply modified to accommodate the additional bulk of garments and use inkjet textile inks, instead of what you buy for your printer at the store. These inks cost upward of $1000 per gallon, which is why printing on colored garments is so costly; an underbase of white ink has to be laid below the actual colors of your design to ensure that the colors look like you intended. All of this ink adds up! 
  
  The process used for translating the colors from the digital image into ink to print onto the garment relies on the CMYK color model. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and the key color, which is black. This model is also referred to as four-color processing because it uses combinations of these four ink colors, usually applied in the order in which they appear in the acronym, to create all the colors in the digital design. 
  
  The inks bind directly to the fibers of the garment's material, which is why cotton - a fibrous material - is better for DTG printing than polyester - a much smoother material. Once all the colors have been added and the design is complete, heat will often be used to dry the ink. This entire process can take as little as a minute to complete! 
  
  

  How DTG Compares To:

  • Screenprinting
    Screen printing has an expensive and labor-intensive setup, while DTG has almost no setup at all. This makes DTG more cost effective for "small" orders (less than around ten of a garment) where this cost is not divided between many garments. However, once setup is complete, the per-unit cost of screenprinting is much cheaper than that of DTG (remember that $1000-per-gallon ink?), which makes it more cost-effective for larger orders. Screenprinting cannot capture as much detail nor as many colors as DTG, but the colors that are screenprinted are more vibrant. Screenprinting also allows for the use of more different types of ink, like metallic or glow-in-the-dark, and can be used on polyester materials that DTG inks cannot bind to.
  • Heat Transfer
    Heat transfers use heat and pressure to embed ink into the surface of the garment's material, whereas DTG binds directly to a material's fibers and does not feature a heat component. DTG is a much higher quality printing method than heat transfers.
  • Dye Sublimation
    Both DTG and Dye Sublimation are forms of digital printing, meaning that both translate digital images from a computer onto a garment. The main difference is that dye sublimation uses heat to push ink straight from the solid form to a gas, thus skipping the liquid form that DTG is completed in. The gas that results from the use of heat infuses the material's fibers and allows for printing on polyester, which DTG cannot do reliably.
  
  VIsit us today at www.SterlingPrinting.com for more information or email us at sales@SterlingPrinting.com

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Benefits of printing with Union shops

STERLING PRINTING IS A UNION PRINT SHOP!

Union printing is a comitment we take seriously.  The printing we produce – from client direct mail to our business cards – features the union printing label. The union printing label, referred to as a union “bug,” is the equivalent of an artist’s signature on their painting. It shows that the men and women who printed our pieces are members of a union and stand behind their work. As union members they  recieve a union wage and benefits. It also assures our clients that we are producing the highest quality product possible.

What exactly does the union printing "bug" mean? Who is eligible to use the union "bug" on printed materials? What are the unions of the printing industry?

When it comes to union printers, the largest labor organization – with councils throughout the United States and Canada – is known as the Allied Printing Trades Council. There are two unions that comprise this council: the Graphic Communications Conference (GCC) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA).  There are also some smaller union organizations that have organized print shops; including the Painters and Allied Trades (most often seen in the making of signs, buttons, etc.), and some smaller, independent unions located in smaller geographic regions of the country. It is important to note that only print shops with their employees unionized by recognized union organizations or shops that have a valid union label license agreement are authorized to print the union printers "bug" on their pieces. 

Whether you want printing for your next campaign or just support union shops-we are here to offer you best product at very competitive pricing. Visit us at www.SterlingPrinting.com or email us your next project at sales@SterlingPrinting.com

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Local Printing Company

A lot of people wonder where they can find local printing companies that aren’t part of giant corporations like Staples or FedEx.

That’s why finding a local print shop you can trust to do good work is so important these days. This article is designed to help you find local print shops in your area.

Using local printing companies

The main benefit of local print shops is obviously the proximity to your home or office. You don’t need to drive very far to find a local print shop that can handle your printing and copying projects.

Local print shops also have a variety of different equipment available for their printing. Most small shops won’t be able to handle large print jobs that require lots of customization. Making sure that your local print shop has the capability to handle your print products is tantamount to getting the product you envision.

Instead of messing around with corporate printing companies that don’t provide great service, or won’t deliver a quality product like you need, you should consider Sterling Printing which is a true one stop print shop.

Sterling Printing also offers a Rush Critical shipping option, on anything from business cards to t-shirts, newsletter to direct mail postcards and everything in between

Contact Sterling Printing, a Greater Boston areas local printing shop

visit us online at www.SterlingPrinting.com

or email us sales@SterlingPrinting.com

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Direct Mail to help you grow

Why not try direct mail postcards?

Direct mail postcards are an easy way to showcase your product or services.  They can be designed in a variety of sizes to ensure that they get noticed in the mail.  You can control the timing of when you want them to reach your customers.  If you don’t have a mailing list, we can help with that.  Just tell us what type of customers you are trying to target, business, residential or both.  The geographic area that you would like to target, the demographics of the people, including possibly age, male or female, income level, etc.  The more that you narrow down your target market, the better results you will see.

Get Measured Results.

Be sure to include a clear call to action on your printed piece. Tell your audience exactly what you would like them to do. Should they give you a call, send you an email, register for your seminar or download a free whitepaper? By including a direct call to action, you will improve your response rate.

You can measure the results from your postcard campaign by setting up a special tracking phone number that will ring to your main number or by creating a unique domain name or Personalized URL (PURLs) for each mailing.  If you offer a discount, you can put a special code on the postcard that the recipient can use when they order online or have them bring the postcard in when they come to place an order.

Social media and web marketing are right for some markets, but the time tested practices of direct mail still generate substantial results. From creative concepts and eye-catching designs, to expert production, mailing list curation, and efficient, effective distribution, Sterling Printing can manage your direct mail project every step of the way. Whatever the goal, we’ll help you get the word out and succeed.  If you would like to give direct mail a try, visit www.SterlingPrinting.com  or give us a call and we will work with you to create a winning direct mail campaign.

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5 Steps to Building Your Brand on Instagram

5 Steps to Building Your Brand on Instagram

Posted on 02/29/2016

Instagram, the image-based social networking platform, has quickly become one of the most effective ways to market yourself or your business. On Forbes.com, Griffin Thall, the CEO and co-founder of Pura Vida Bracelets shares these five steps for building your brand on Instagram:

Find your niche
Every person or brand must have a niche– a way to set yourself or your business apart from everyone and everything else. Without a niche, you will blend in and become lost in the social media noise. Finding your niche is creating your personality. To get started, first ask yourself: what am I good at? What do I enjoy doing? What is my brand’s main purpose? You need to not only be unique, honest, and sincere, but also somewhat mysterious. Be sure to keep your purpose and persona clear but always strive to have people wanting to know more. If people are confused at what you do in the first few seconds, you’ve lost them for good.

Find your influencers
Once you’ve found your niche, the next step is to find your influencers. An influencer on Instagram is someone who has power, reach and authority among their followers. Pairing your brand with the right voice is the single most important force in getting the word out. Who do you want talking about your brand and sharing your story? Start with people who have between 5k and 25k followers and classify them as your “content producers” or entry-level influencers.

Find your product photographers
Once you’ve found your potential influencers, you need to find product photographers. These Instagram users are similar to influencers, but you are not looking to them for outreach purposes, you are looking to them for high-quality lifestyle or product photos of your brand in action.

Send out samples
Once your list of influencers and photographers is finalized, the next step is to send out samples. To do this, first draft up a very simple and to-the-point email to these Instagram pros. These days, anyone can detect a “spam” or templated email from a mile away, so take your time to draft up a unique email that caters exactly to the person you’re trying to target. Remember, these influencers are sorting through hundreds of emails a day just like you, so your first go is very important.

Courtesy of www.SterlingPrinting.com

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