Business News
St Ives Directs Technical Know-how Bring The House of Bruar Catalogues to Life
Thursday 12. March 2009 - St Ives Direct, the direct mail and commercial print division of St Ives plc, is utilising its superior colour expertise and catalogue production capabilities, to produce the catalogue for the prestigious Scottish based country clothing retailer, The House of Bruar.
Mailed internationally throughout the year to a distinguished list of 560,000 customers including many titled people, The House of Bruar offers premium quality country clothing. This is sold predominantly through mail order catalogues, but also online and through retail outlets.
Pauline Buttress, Mail Order Director, The House of Bruar comments, For us, the quality and impression provided by our catalogue is paramount. We work very closely with St Ives to achieve this, who take complete ownership of the job, and handle everything from colour retouching, to data handling, print, product storage and batched mailing through Royal Mail.
As a business, we rely heavily on mail order sales generated through the catalogue, so our relationship with St Ives is key to our sales strategy. Having worked with St Ives for the past three years, we have a partner that not only knows our business inside out, but is entirely focused on delivering a service that is reliable and flexible, with the internal resources to grow and adapt to our changing needs 24/7 – Whether it is considered part of a traditional print service or not.’
The current 2008-2009 catalogue took roughly eight weeks to produce, and features over 150 pages of products for both male and female country wear. Perfect bound, the 210mm x 196mm catalogues are printed at St Ives Direct in Bradford using two different print processes. Utilising its data management skills, the mailing also includes 17 different product and customer codes, featured on a bound-in four colour customer order form, a personalised customer letter and pre-paid envelope, optional fax form and other promotional inserts.
Once printed and finished, St Ives then uses its mailing house in Leeds to store and then send the catalogue out in batches, ensuring adequate time for The House of Bruar telesales teams to follow-up.
Chris Cowley, Divisional Business Development Director, St Ives Direct, comments, Our brief is to ensure that The House of Bruar catalogue reflects both the high quality and high value nature of the company and its products. In production terms, this means using our skills to ensure superior print quality and customer service, and crucially that the printed product is received in good order. In addition, it also requires accurate data handling, so that recipient names and titles, especially for the nobility, are correct.’
In ensuring this product quality, we work hand-in-hand with the customer on all elements of production. The biggest and most time-consuming part of our role is in colour correction, re-touching most catalogue images against actual products swatches. This activity is crucial in providing the end customer with accurate colours to base purchase decisions.’
Once approved, St Ives then populates pre-designed catalogue page templates with retouched images to conclude the artwork. It then provides scatter proofs for final customer approvals.
Chris continues, For us, production of The House of Bruar catalogue is slightly more unusual for many reasons. Firstly, to maximise production efficiency and costs, we use two different printing techniques. To enable a heavier substrate to be used with special colours for the cover, we use sheetfed-printing technology, while the inside pages are printed using a web offset printer.
While this is fairly common place, most printers and design houses would avoid using one image that spans both an inside front cover using one technique, and the following page printed using another. However, due to our considerable print resources, experience and colour knowledge, we are able to ensure image consistency and provide the catalogue designers with increased freedom.’
It is this product and service flexibility that enabled St Ives Direct to win The House of Bruar business. But it is a continued investment and commitment to further improving customer service, that has enabled St Ives Direct to retain the business and help aid the company’s success.