When placing an order for any sort of printed material, then the fewer you order the more it will cost per item. Take leaflets or flyers for example. If you only want say 10 of them in A6 size, then per item it’s going to cost as much as £1.80 each. Compare that to an order of 1,000 and that will take the cost per item right down to around 6p each. Order larger number and the costs will come down even more. So, why the huge difference in price? Well, depending on the printing method used by your chosen company, then the cost to set up the job, make the set of printing plates, ink up the machine and clean it off when the job is finished will be the same to them no matter how many pages they are producing. So a run of say 50 pages will have the same set up costs as a run of 1000.

printing

The only difference being the actual printing time taken to produce them. Nowadays you will find that some printing companies will produce your work digitally if you only need a short run. As a digital printer is an expensive piece of equipment, some companies will lease them from the manufacturer instead of investing in their own machine, but that doesn’t make it a cheap option. Leasing companies will charge the printer on a “pay per copy” basis and on top of that you have the cost of the toner cartridges as it is rather like a high quality laser printer. It’s a good idea then to think ahead when ordering your printing. If you don’t need a large quantity at the moment will you need the same thing again in a few months time? If so it may be cheaper in the long run to order a higher quantity now.

This guest post about economies of scale in the print industry came to you courtesy of the team at UK based Circle Services Leaflet Printing, one of the UK’s longest established print shops, having been offering services since 1953.