For Jim Achey, who got his start in the printing business more than 50 years ago, the industry has changed in ways that he never imagined and “mostly for the better,” he said.

For the past two decades, Achey has owned ScanGraphics, an Urbandale print shop that specializes in medium-sized to large jobs. Like other owners of printing businesses in Greater Des Moines, Achey has had to make many changes to his equipment, personnel and the way he does business, along with learning to adapt to smaller profit margins.

“Doing business in the year 2005 is challenging,” Achey said. “Everything has become so price-driven and so competitive, and none of us can make profits like we used to. We have too much iron (printing presses) in the city, and it takes a lot to keep them busy.”

According to the most recent data available from Printing Industries of the Midlands Inc., a regional trade association, in 2003, 114 of the state’s 635 printing businesses were based in Des Moines. The high number of printers per capita, along with a reduced workload resulting from companies doing more work in house and using non-print media for communications pieces, has created challenges for print shops’ bottom lines.

“We’ll go in spurts, but in general, the printing business is not nearly as busy as it used to be,” Achey said. “I think some of it is from the Internet, with online newsletters and so forth, and also, companies are buying big Xerox machines and doing more work in house. The machines don’t work as fast or have the same caliber of quality as ours, but they get the job done on the timeline they want. That has hurt a lot of printers when that work is not farmed out.”

“Big clients are like an elephant; when they die, they fall on you,” said Jan DeBartolo, who owns Impact Business Printing in downtown Des Moines. DeBartolo’s shop caters to small-scale jobs, and she said her workload has stayed fairly level in recent years, although the future of the industry sometimes concerns her.

“There is still a lot for us to do, but it’s different work than we used to have,” DeBartolo said. “It’s hard to know where this is all going to end up, but for now, we have jobs and plenty of work to do.”

DeBartolo has owned her business for about 30 years. She said her work now revolves around projects such as marketing materials, whereas it used to include more large copy jobs.

When Steve Capellen opened The Copy Shop in Ankeny six years ago, he decided to offer a more diverse range of services to offset the “erosion of the bottom line” he said commercial printers face. His shop prints signs, trophies, awards and banners, which he said complements the needs of his clients.

“We have a lot of ability to cross-sell,” Capellen said. “We do a lot of copying for associations that need trophies and companies ordering business cards who also need banners.”

Achey’s ScanGraphics began as a provider of pre-press services to advertising agencies, printers and others, but a decade ago, the shop’s workload started to decline in that area.

“Many of the changes we’ve seen can be tracked back to when the Macs (Macintosh computers) hit the streets and desktop publishing became more common,” Achey said. “I knew by 1997 that we had to do something different, so we invested in a new printing press.”

Achey bought another press last October so that ScanGraphics could keep up with its workload. Buying a printing press is not a decision that you make on a whim, these shop owners said, because the good equipment carries large price tags.

“Some of these can get up to $1.3 million for the printer,” Achey said. “The cost is unbelievable, and it’s a real problem for small companies to spend that much money.”

But The Copy Shop’s Capellen said you need to buy the best equipment and continually update software to stay competitive.

“With the competitive market we’re in, you’re almost forced to buy some of the higher-end equipment because it’s the most efficient, and you have to be able to make a profit on a job when it’s done,” Capellen said. “Keeping up with technology is an expensive proposition.”

Printing equipment costs more than it used to, but it also comes with features that were not available in the past. Now, presses are programmed to automatically do things that used to be done by experienced pressmen, such as loading plates and adjusting the ink flow, and some of these steps now take only a fraction of the time that used to be involved. But Achey said one of the major drawbacks of the new machines is that it’s harder to find skilled pressmen to operate them.

“The pressmen do not need to have the skill level that they used to have, but if there’s a problem, I want our operators to know how to solve it,” Achey said. “I can’t afford to bring somebody in here and train them because of the fast turnarounds we’re working on.”

Like Achey, DeBartolo said technology has been a “double-edged sword” for her business. Although having customers provide her with the media to use in production saves time initially, she still has a lot of work to do to format the materials correctly.

“People tend to use the programs that they know, and the programs have limitations,” DeBartolo said. “The jobs come in on CDs, but we have to preflight everything and go through and fix the files so that they’ll output the way that the customers want them. We have to have a computer person on every job that comes in.”

Achey said some of the materials customers give him to work with result in a lower-quality product than when printing companies were responsible for more stages of the production process.

“We used to do the four-color scanning for photographs on a scanner that cost more than $250,000,” he said. “Now, people can buy a table-top scanner at Best Buy for really cheap, but their scans aren’t as good as they used to be. The quality that we cared about 10 years ago is not there; now turnaround and cost are customers’ top concerns.”

Achey said he still enjoys the printing business, although he misses the days when there were pressmen in the industry “that could almost perform magic on a press.”

DeBartolo said printing shops like hers will continue to face challenges, but she doesn’t expect the industry to die off because she feels that the printed word has a power unlike any other form of communication.

“I don’t have a crystal ball, but I don’t see this business going away at this point,” DeBartolo said. “Print materials get materials in people’s hands in a way that nothing else does.”

Vanishing print shops

The number of commercial printers in Des Moines and the United States is dropping each year, with the National Association for Printing Leadership predicting a 25 percent decrease between 1998 and 2007. The association cites five trends as challenges facing the industry: outsourcing overseas, advances in desktop printing, improvements in networked digital copiers, Internet newsletters and catalogs or directories printed on the Web or on CDs.

According to Printing Industries of the Midlands Inc., a regional trade association serving Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota, although the number of printing businesses in Iowa dropped from 649 in 2002 to 635 in 2003, with six of those closures being in Des Moines, the number of people who work in printing and the amount of work in the industry is growing.