Factory Visit

Friday, January 21st 2011

A roll of paper

The factory visit has been a firm fixture on the business calendar ever since just after factories were invented. In our opinion it’s one of the most enjoyable ways you can spend a day of work.

We took some time today to visit one of our key suppliers. We discussed new products, pricing and making our service better for you, our customers.

This factory is run by a good boss.

World's Greatest Boss

There are lots of corridors and stairs. Always a good sign.

Lots of this

There was lots of paper, some of it with foreign words printed on.

Foreign

Often factories can be a long way from your headquarters, nowadays with globalisation, sometimes even in another country. That didn’t deter us. Community Management came from Scotland, CEO came from CEOland, Engineering came from the land where they make hats out of the jumpers the Levellers used to wear. Art came from LA, hence the one sock rolled up “gang” look.

IMG_1464.JPG

Where were Sales and Marketing I hear you tapping into your keyboards! Worry not. They were out pounding the streets, knocking on doors, doing the deals that fund these extravagant excursions.

It was a good day.

Posted by Ben | Comments (1)

File under: developments

Westward ho!

Wednesday, December 15th 2010

You might remember that back in the days of summer we started shipping internationally. This was, of course, our initial attempt to dominate the global market in helping people make their own newspapers. But whilst world domination remains on the ‘to do’ list, we’re pleased with how things have gone – it’s certainly done its bit in doubling our sales in the last four months.

Where are we delivering to? Well, the Nordic region has been a popular destination. I guess this may have a lot to do with quite a few people up there speaking English very well (often better than a lot of us), making our website easily understood. We’ve also delivered a disproportionate number of papers to Germany – but the reason why is mysterious.

We’re keen to do more internationally, especially as we’re not delivering as much as we’d like to the US (even though the delivery cost seems fairly reasonable). We’ve concluded that a better way to help more people over there make their own newspapers might be to partner with some US printers – we can then print locally and, like we do in the UK, absorb domestic delivery costs. We’d also then stir ourselves to bill in dollars.

We have a couple of interesting potential partners, but could do with adding some more candidates from around the country… which leads me to make a bit of a bleg: if anyone could recommend US newspaper printers we’d be very grateful. It’s been particularly difficult to find printers that can (or are willing) to produce newspapers digitally (i.e. in small runs that remain economic), so suggestions in this area would be even more gratefully received. Please email me at gareth[at]newspaperclub[dot]co[dot]uk.

It’s probably worth pointing out that just because we’re getting all excited about the US, it doesn’t mean we’re not also thinking about the rest of the world. We’re always interested to talk to people who have ideas about how we might work together in places we’re not, but should be…

Posted by Gareth | Comments (2)

File under: developments,printers

Exciting New Product Launch

Thursday, December 9th 2010

Newspaper Club Christmas special

As you may have noticed we’ve launched Newspaper Club Gift Vouchers. The perfect gift for someone for whom you can’t think of the perfect gift. Available in denominations of £35, £70 or £120 (equivalent to 5, 20 or 100 12-page black and white newspapers).

What you may not have noticed is that we’ve updated the pictures we use on our homepage. We like to show off the papers our customers have printed, so we’ve used pictures from the Newspaper Club Flickr group.

Music Hack Day newspaper

I’d like to thank Thomas Bonte who took the picture above at a recent Music Hack Day

these are patterns

And I’d like to thank m8roberto who took this picture above of his splendid Patterns newspaper.

Posted by Ben | Comments (0)

File under: art,developments

Bigger papers and smaller runs

Monday, October 11th 2010

10 september - 07 47

(the picture above was taken from Hybrids, a show at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, that features some of the stuff that Newspaper Club has printed)

When we first started Newspaper Club we set a number of restrictions to make it as simple as possible for us to get up and running, and to limit the number of things that could go wrong.

One of those was pagination: on day one, you could only print a 12 page newspaper. It made it easier for us to calculate the shipping costs and deal with logistics, and it felt like a reasonable compromise – 12 pages is thick enough to feel like a proper newspaper, but not so thick that it’s hard to fill.

But we’ve grown up, and many of our customers want a bit more flexibility. So, from today, you can print anything from 4 to 64 pages (in multiples of four, obviously).

Hurrah! Head on over to the pricing page to find out what it’ll cost you.

In addition, we’re now able to offer lower quantity full colour runs – now as few as 300 copies, down from the 500 minimum before. We know that you want even lower quantity colour runs, and we’re working on it, but we’re not quite there yet.

Posted by Tom | Comments (2)

File under: developments,engineering

What would you like us to do next?

Thursday, July 15th 2010

Newspaper Club meeting

Earlier in the week we had another two ‘away days’ or ‘planning sessions’ or whatever you’d like to call them. Two days where we all get together, from as far afield as Glasgow, and talk about making Newspaper Club better.

We’ve got some exciting plans and there’s some stuff we’ve been wanting to do for ages that we think we’ll be able to do soon.

Engineering made me upload this

But as you know we like to quieten down for the summer so there probably won’t be much news until September. So we thought this was a good time to ask what you would like to see us do next? Are there any features you’d like to add? And services we should be offering? Anything we could make better? Anything we should do more of? Anything we haven’t even thought of yet?

Leave a comment and let us know.

Posted by Ben | Comments (10)

File under: developments

World* domination beckons

Thursday, July 8th 2010

What with our top secret plans and all, it’s exciting times at Newspaper Club HQ. We’ve just finished working with some of the UK’s top creative minds to create this glitzy corporate video to announce…

announcement from russelldavies on Vimeo.

… the good news that Newspaper Club now ships internationally. Yes, you can now enjoy your own freshly printed newspapers wherever you are in the world. Hooray!

(*Actually, that’s not really true. What we actually mean is we have a system that can automatically get you a price wherever you are in Europe, Australia and North America. The rest of the world will be on the menu soon. But, in the meantime, if you’re somewhere else we may well be able to ship to you, you’ll just have to get in touch for a quote.)

If you’d like to the see how much it costs, just select your country from the drop-down list at the top of the Prices page. You’ll see a total price which includes printing and shipping. All of our prices are in British Pounds, so you’ll need to do the math to get a local price, but that’s the only extra step we ask you to take. Everything else is the same – sign up, create your newspaper online or upload a ready-made PDF, order and pay. Easy!

Turnaround times are only slightly longer than UK shipping. So let’s say 10 days to be on the safe side but in reality your newspapers are likely to arrive sooner than that. Prices for various quantities of our standard 12-pages newspapers are on the list, for anything else please contact us for a quote.

Posted by anne | Comments (3)

File under: developments

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