Article Presentation for Audience Research on the New York Times Case Study involving Big D Custom Screen Printing and their switch to client targeting strategy.

1. A New York Times CaseStudy
Review by: Eli Williamson

3.  Big D Custom Screen Printing
 T-shirt Printing
 Austin, Texas
 Darren Robbins (co-founder)
 Dispute with business partner about pursuing smaller
orders instead of seeking large accounts exclusively
 Price Rates
 $5 a tee for orders of 40-499 shirts
 $3.50 a tee for orders of 1000+ shirts

4.  New York Times formally asked Darren’s question:
 “Can chasing small customers lead to larger profits?”
 Darren Robbins
 Actually set out to test this approach with his company
and measured the results by annual financial reports
 Darren’s Business Partner
 Tested pursuing large accounts in hopes of larger profit
margins in the long run

5.  Shifting the target consumer and lowering price rates
 Public pricing (transparent pricing)
 Could this cause a price war? – no, just nasty emails.
 Annual Sales Reports
 2008 - Year One: $325,000 (breaking even)
 2009 - Year Two: $675,000 (more than double year one)
 2010 - Year Three: $900,000 (nearly triple year one)
 Overall take-away:
 Chasing small customers can lead to larger profits
 “Small-order customers account for roughly 60 percent of our
return business. Just as important — if not more — their positive
word-of-mouth accounts for 75 percent of our new
customers, including some of our largest.” – Darren Robbins

6.  Limiting your targeted consumer to only large clients is a
poor decision in attempting to increase revenue
 I can see how this may work for some larger, more established
businesses but not for small businesses and especially not
start-ups who don’t have a clientele yet
 Objections
 Inefficiencies in targeting small-order clients
 More wasted product (color correction and test prints)
 Study Weaknesses
 Just examines just one business – a small start-up at that
 One location (initially), inexperienced owners, shedding a business
partner after the first year (one less salary)
 Are the results unique to just the screen printing industry?

7.  Darren Robbins embarked on his business experiment with clear goals
as well as an accurate and paced method of measuring his new
approach’s success
 Goal: To become profitable by catering to small printing orders
 Accurate & Paced Measurements: Annual Sales Totals
 Yes it is an article, but it is also a case study
 The New York Times approached the formatting of the story as if it were
an experiment
 Segmenting elements such as: the challenge, the background, the options, the
decision, and the results
 Received insight from readers and other professionals to differentiate opinions on
whether Robbins’s decision was right
 The New York Times released a follow up article a week after the original
was published
 Contained results with concrete numbers in the annual sales reports that proved
the correlation between small-order focus and increased profitability in the screen
printing industry.

8.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/business/smallbusiness/28sbiz.html?ref=casestudies
 http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/was-big-d-wise-to-pursue-small-customers/