It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. The Romans probably brought in lower priced breastplates and tunics from branch plants in Carthage. The loss of domestic jobs to cheaper labour conditions offshore‚ (or down the road in a neighbouring town – it’s all a question of perspective) has been around as long as manufacturing, and comes and goes in waves. And like a wave you either rise with it, duck under it and resurface, or you let it catch you unaware and dump you on the shore like a beached whale carcass.

Larger UK screen printers may not want to hear that after watching another big client pull a job, which the printer had helped build from a few test prints into a major retail line. Idle autos equal excruciating pain for any screen shop owner, which is made even worse by watching the job that should have been running on their 12 colour line get sent off to the Far East for bulk printing.

This particular wave has started to crest over UK textile printers recently, and now in 2006 shows no sign of breaking up. It’s only going to get faster and deeper. Whether a company can survive this Tsqueegee Tsunami rolling over the domestic screenprinting industry, only time will tell.

If it is of any consolation to P&P readers, the same thing has been happening in the USA and Canada as well, so the mother country should be assured others are sharing your pain. Over here there’s been a long running bloodbath with some of the nation’s largest print shops going broke in the last two years, and others scrambling to stay solvent.

The lifting of the duties on cheap cotton garments from China just added insult to the salt being rubbed in the wound. One interesting phenomena as a result of this is the proliferation of small start-ups, where production people from larger companies have grouped together and set up new print shops to service the hundreds of smaller accounts suddenly without a printer.

Businesses which found themselves going under because of lo-ball pricing and loss of print runs on their presses need to react quickly and effectively if they want to continue as a profitable enterprise, because it is a hard and fast rule in the jungle of business, that once a product becomes a common commodity‚ - i.e. nothing but five or 15 thin layers of ink on a piece of fabric - then the work will almost always go to the lowest bidder who promises they can deliver the job.

Quality becomes a question of degree. With labour costs overseas sometimes only 10% of what it costs a typical UK printer to print a job, it’s easy to see where the savings and increased profit lies. What to do about it is the hard part.

I can’t claim to be an economic guru, or have any magic answers, but I can give shop owners some ideas that might suggest possible escape routes for their companies when the offshore Tsqueegee Tsunami hits their street.

Common Commodity - the easiest way to avoid competing for pennies per print is to own the image and create a unique product. In the future, maintain creative rights to all images and processes, and think about developing your own lines that will set you apart from the crowd. Have great designers who can work the magic in prepress and have printers that can deliver it on press. That brings in clients who share your values to you and keeps them there.

Diversify - for screen printers, this should automatically include branching into other areas of specialty imaging - stickers, advertising materials, and contract industrial decorating are three screen printed product areas which can be entered with minimal equipment or technological reinvestment for textile printers, and in many areas allow you to service existing client’s other marketing needs. Get a digital textile printer and investigate on demand full colour printing. It is the future, after all.

Development Program - screenprinters have to become more like master gardeners and less like the guy who drives the harvester tractor. There was this maxim of business a few years back - good hardcore managers ran their shop on the 20/80 rule. 20% of their customers gave them 80% of their profits, so get rid of those pesky low volume accounts.

Hone the customer list, run with the big dogs, the experts all said. Problem is, those 80% of small accounts are where your future big accounts come from. That scruffy kid with the weird drawings that wants to create a line of shirts may be the next big thing. Any business needs to have a blend of up-and- comers as well as established large accounts.

Delivery and quick Service - play this trump card well and often. Not everyone can wait for a slow boat from China, or Thailand for that matter. Quick turnaround and the ability to deliver the product right the first time has a monetary value, and differentiates you from some factory in a Shanghai suburb.

Quality - It sounds like a cliché, but you may be surprised to find that people not only appreciate quality, but will pay for it. Case in point - American Apparel. The growth of this company in the USA (founded and run by a Canadian of course!) runs contrary to the general devastation that hit the rag trade in the USA a few years back.

Not only do they sew the clothing in their own factories, they wholesale to printers, and build brand loyalty through their rapidly expanding retail network. All built on a good fit, a pride in workmanship, and old fashioned patriotic marketing. Price is not the first consideration. In fact it isn’t even number two or three.

Time - it is on your side, you know. The shop that is experiencing a serious dent in sales due to the loss of large orders has to react quickly to cut expenses, and needs to do whatever is necessary to keep the core of the business going until management and sales can line up new customers or figure out a new direction and strategy for the company. If this means you have to shrink the workforce, do it quickly.

Nothing adds up quicker than the hours of idle workers - much better to keep the good ones who know what they are doing, and let them work the extra shifts. If it means moving to smaller and less expensive premises, then do it quickly. Regroup, refocus, recharge and rebuild your company. You did it once to get where you are, it should be easier the second time around.

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