Lithosphere Printing Philosophy

Lithosphere's Philosophy

There are some 50,000 printing companies in Britain, each with their own specialism in terms of process, product, plant configuration, pricing structure, and skill level. In this context, finding the right people is normally guesswork with a complete over-dependence on "someone who knows someone", and "the people we used last time".

Specifying exactly what you want is the first hurdle. It's difficult to do this effectively without first knowing the full range of choices available, given the materials you are supplying and the price, timing and quality factors implicit in the options presented.

Unless, that is, you have someone who can sympathetically and clearly communicate to you those choices and their implications; - and then translate your requirements into a specification covering all the angles, that is crystal clear to all concerned.

In addition, there are ethical issues in print buying. Printing is a dirty business. But given the choices, none of us - even the most hard-headed - actually prefers to use the most toxic materials and wasteful processes operated by an exploited workforce.

We work hard to avoid these pitfalls without compromising on price or quality.

And then there are the scams commonly used. Watch out for:

mystification with jargon
using inferior materials
padding out the extras
concealing economies of scale
short delivering
covering up errors

There's no way you can deal with these time honoured tricks of the trade unless you know the business well from the inside.

Taking the above factors into account, print buying is a "hassle". It is time consuming. It is a complex trade-off between price, quality and scale. It can be an organisational nightmare. So many parties can be involved. So many things can go wrong. It is often hard to distinguish between pure incompetence and other causes of problems. Seemingly unpredictable glitches can have disastrous effects in time or money or both. It is a minefield of jargon, technology, and cowboys.

Lithosphere is here to deal with all these problems.
We know of no other organisation which does quite what we do.