Jupiter Minuteman Press is "the little print shop that could". They are a small quick-print shop in southeast Florida, and have a wide spectrum of clients. Their specialty is customer service. By understanding their client's job from start to finish, they help prevent their clients from having to do a job twice! Their motto is "Powerfully Positive Efficient Production". Following is a short interview with Barb Watson, owner of Jupiter Minuteman Press, discussing how DesignMerge has helped meet their unique challenges with a solution that has resulted in increased profits and an expanded customer base.

"We started using DesignMerge about three years ago for a specific job with a national financial institution. The project was a double-sided, 8.5 x 11 letter with 26 fields of variable data for 300,000 of their clients. We worked with a local mail house using text fields, bar codes, and numeric fields. This project came to us at a time when we were searching for a variable data printing solution and talking with several VDP companies about their products and services. Needless to say, we were very surprised with what we learned! One company allowed us to use their software for a three-week trial, but refused technical support because we had not made a purchase yet. Guess why we chose not to purchase? Two other VDP companies never returned phone calls or email! So imagine how delighted we were with DesignMerge, a superior product and company that provided us with a Web Ex demo, free trial software and excellent technical guidance. The choice was clear: DesignMerge was the perfect product, with outstanding technical support, to enable this "little print shop" to stay ahead of the big dog printers all around us!"

What business challenges have you faced in the VDP market?

Our biggest challenge is pricing out our jobs. Most of our clients are still trying to understand the value of variable data printing as it relates to their ROI. This concept is a lot more sophisticated than just applying labels to a direct mail piece. Much of our job is educating customers, showing them that their profit will increase with one-to-one personalized campaigns. Additionally, DesignMerge enables us to seamlessly create superior design work that just a few years ago was unimaginable.

Why did you choose DesignMerge for your VDP implementation?

We chose DesignMerge for two reasons. First and foremost is their outstanding technical support and customer service. DesignMerge technical support has returned my calls after hours simply because they knew we were working overtime to get jobs finished. If the solution isn't readily available, their support team always gets back to us within 24 hours.
 
The second reason is that DesignMerge is a completely American-made and supported software product. Every line of code was written in the USA. We know that when we have questions they'll be answered, and we won't be routed to another country or logged into a queue for a call back ... maybe, whenever! We're also confident in our investment with DesignMerge, that as our variable data business grows, DesignMerge will continue to meet our needs.

What were the results of your DesignMerge implementation?

Results with DesignMerge have been fantastic! We are now able to offer and do more for our clients with personalized design and marketing. Recently, we printed name badges for a major baseball tournament for all players, their respective teams, their stats and coaches - adding a level of accountability and security to the event. This wasn't even something we thought of during our variable data printing research!

Additionally, we've personalized many events by adding the year to the sequential numbering on raffle tickets, i.e. 2010-0001 through 2010-6000. We've personalized school events with nametags that include department and grade levels. Stadiums have contracted with us to create parking passes for press agents, sports players, managers and team executives. We even had the occasion to create press badges for a well-known rock band this summer. With DesignMerge, we are all partying like rock stars!