How PacBlue Printing of Vancouver, British Columbia, succeeds by regularly reinventing themselves to adapt to a changing market.

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2. F
or success at surfing the shifting sands of today’s
printing market, PacBlue Printing of Vancouver,
British Columbia serves as a valuable role model. In
a recent conversation the company’s owners, Jonathan
Colley, President and CEO, and Paul Talbot,VP of Busi-
ness Development, describe how they regularly reinvent
PacBlue, built around toner- and inkjet-based produc-
tion, by selectively acquiring new technology and prod-
ucts to boost profitability.
“You have to morph yourself to adapt to a changing
market,” advises Colley. “We’re constantly working to
keep up with technology and add new products and
services with our equipment acquisitions.”
Before Colley’s and Talbot’s professional lives con-
verged at PacBlue, neither had ever worked in printing.
Colley was an importer of Seiko watches in South
Africa until he immigrated to Canada, where he first
tried his hand at the fast-food business. He didn’t like it,
and decided instead to purchase a printing company
called Pacific Blueprinting.
As the name suggests, initially their entire produc-
tion consisted of blueprints of construction drawings
for architects, engineers, and developers. Colley now
laughs recalling how they first created the blueprints by
the diazo process, using smelly ammonia compounds.
In 1995 a merger with a smaller company brought
them reprographic capabilities to produce the blueprints
on toner and laser devices, along with colour and the ex-
pertise they needed to support these new offerings.
Colley recounts: “At that stage, we dug deep into re-
searching the colour side of the business, including the
different companies that were going to be our com-
petitors. Quite a few people had already joined me from
the company Paul worked at. One of the key elements
we follow in maintaining a good corporate culture is
asking our employees for referrals. So I learned a lot
about Paul’s capabilities from my other staff, who even-
tually enticed me to have a face-to-face with him.”
Talbot had immigrated to Canada from the United
Kingdom and had built his career on both sides of the
Atlantic as a production manager for ad agencies, co-
ordinating their outsourced production of everything
from radio and TV ads to print collateral.“At PacBlue,
we introduced colour management at an early stage,
since colour at its best has always been in the
forefront of our brand,” he says.
Colley adds that they have followed the
strategy of growth by merger several times
since, including the addition of signs to their
business in 2007. The company works with
Océ LightJet 430 large-format, photo-laser
technology in order to handle the photo-
graphic materials required in graphics for
fashion and cosmetics.“In its history, the com-
pany has evolved from blueprinting to repro-
graphics to small-, large, and grand-format
digital imaging, and from selling a specific
product to a certain niche market to selling a
wide cross-section of merchandise to a wide
variety of clients,” he summarizes.
Many of their high-impact projects are doc-
umented on PacBlue’s Website, including three
realistic 2/3-scale façades of houses printed on
crezone to showcase a nursery’s landscaping
products. (Placing young plants around a 2/3-
scale façade yielded the same effect as mature plantings
surrounding a full-sized home.) Colley continues:“The
nice thing is that when clients come in and we take
them on a tour to show them all the different equip-
ment and different types of printing we can do, and un-
veil samples of their own work reproduced our
equipment, a lot of times they are blown away. We en-
courage them to step outside the box by giving them
the message that, when they think of a creative idea,
we’ll help them find a way to execute it. Hence our cur-
rent slogan: ‘You think it, we’ll print it!’”
DECEMBER 2010 • PRINTACTION • 15
VICTORIA GAITSKELL
PacBlue’s
Success at
Reinvention
PacBlue ventured into the signage market in 2007 and
now produces work for fashion and cosmetics.
PacBlue’s Paul Talbot, VP of Business Development,
and Jonathan Colley, President and CEO.
Based on the economic realities of today, PacBlue finds
itself dealing more directly with real-estate companies.
The early adoption of colour management has allowed
PacBlue to secure high-end clients.
Continued on page 30

3. Capitalizing on change
PacBlue presently employs 80 staff, di-
vided between two downtown locations
to facilitate quick turnarounds, which for
construction drawings can amount to as
little as 30 minutes or an hour, says Tal-
bot. “Because of our reputation for fast
turnaround in reprographics, clients
think we can turn around large-format
colour just as quickly as black-and-white
copies!”
Colley and Talbot report, that in the
last two years, the decline of real estate in
the Greater Vancouver Area, has altered
their product mix. While reprographics
used to account for about 65 percent of
their business, and still remains signifi-
cant, it now represents only 40 percent.
They have also seen orders decline for
mounts on wall and plexiglass panels
that were once rife in the midst of the
city’s real-estate boom, which lasted for
years until the 2008 economic crash.
As yet, large-format work stands at 43
percent of PacBlue’s business, but they
say it is the fastest growing area. Their
other recent gains include the retail mar-
ket.“At first we didn’t have a big presence
in the retail area, because we were so
busy with the blueprint side of things,”
Talbot explains. “Then when we
switched into large format it was mainly
the building-construction industry that
bought it and kept us so busy.We weren’t
really reaching out to other areas. But
once that industry slowed down, we
started concentrating more on the retail
market. Now it has become one of the
fastest growing areas.”
Additionally, Talbot observes that now
they deal with fewer middlemen:“Clients
used to want the prestige of having an ad
agency, but all that’s changed now. Now
it’s harder for agencies to do anything
more than just the creative, and they
don’t have as much work going through
production.
“Through research, we discovered that
people’s recognition of the name
PacBlue was good, but they didn’t con-
nect it with what we currently do,”
explains Colley. So in 2009 the company
retained Hot Tomali Communications
Inc. to help reposition them from a re-
prographics company to a high-impact,
high-quality toner-based printer.
The process resulted in an updated
logo and Website, and a blitz of giant-
sized business cards, dropped off at se-
lected targets to introduce PacBlue as
large-format printing specialists. In Oc-
tober 2010, they hired Nicolas Slobinsky
as Marketing Communications Manager,
whose auspices include a corporate blog
with a scan-of-the-week contest in which
participants must identify an object
shown in an extreme close-up view that
showcases PacBlue’s powerful Cruse scan-
ner. Slobinsky also oversees Facebook
Gaitskell
Continued from page 15
30 • PRINTACTION • DECEMBER 2010
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4. pages and Twitter tweets documenting
such occurrences as the lunch-hour
snowball fight that PacBlue organized
one November Thursday to mark Van-
couver’s uncharacteristically large snow-
fall that week.
Conquering challenges
Among their challenges, Colley and Tal-
bot cite issues raised by their competi-
tion: “Like everyone else working at this
time, we’re under economic pressure be-
cause customers are looking for a better
price if they can get it. Pricing is a huge
problem – especially for companies of
our size with high overhead, and espe-
cially for large format on the West Coast,
where we’re competing with a lot of
small mom-and-pop operations that
come and go frequently, and tend to
drive prices down,” says Colley.
This year, for the first time, the part-
ners will keep PacBlue open for business
over the Christmas holidays, formerly a
mandatory vacation period for staff.
“We’ve learned that a number of our
competitors will be open; so we’ve de-
cided to push the fact out to clients that
we’ll also be open to service them, and
see how it pans out,” says Talbot.
Colley also describes how their com-
pany continually strives to monitor and
improve efficiencies to keep costs down.
But in the near future, printers may
realize fewer savings from this type of
approach than were possible in flusher
times.
Back in 2008, for instance, it was feasi-
ble for News International, a British
newspaper publisher owned by Rupert
Murdoch’s News Corporation, to open
the world’s biggest newspaper plant in
Broxbourne, Hertfordshire. Costing
£187MM, the new facility churned out
86,000 papers an hour on each of 12
state-of-the-art presses, versus the 30,000
papers per hour formerly produced at
the company’s Wapping operation in
East London. It also employed only 200
operators versus the 600 formerly on the
company’s Wapping payroll.
During a late-November keynote
speech, at Print World 2010 in Toronto,
entitled Where is the Printing Industry
Headed, pundit Frank Romano forecast
that things will no longer work that way.
Romano agreed that, just as happened in
England, printers could formerly make
staff cuts to justify buying technology to
increase productivity. But now, two years
and a recession later, when most printing
companies are squeaking by with the low-
est staff counts in decades, Romano be-
lieves further staff cuts are far less feasible
because they entail cutting below bone.
Consequently, Romano concludes that
the best way left for printers to build their
revenue is to find new kinds of printing
that customers are willing to purchase at
a premium. It’s still a good time to invest
in equipment, he says, but only so long as
the equipment does something new and
unique that customers value and will pay
more money for.
Colley and Talbot confirm they are al-
ready planning initiatives along these
lines that will revise their approach to
the market yet again in 2011.
Victoria Gaitskell is keen to exchange ideas
with readers at victoria@printaction.com
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