No business can do without commercial stationery such as letterheads, business cards and advertising material. So what steps can you take to reduce the burden on the environment when it comes to printed matter?
The new design of our letterhead and product data sheets provided us with lots of opportunities to make savings.
Several years ago, AMPEG stipulated printing on both sides of blank paper as the default printer setting for every employee. Simply making this setting in the printer options effected a real reduction in paper consumption of up to 30 percent. Unfortunately, the letter headed paper we were using back then did not allow for printing on both sides of the paper due to its design.
One aspect of the newly designed letterhead was to take this into account. The layout was designed to make double-sided printing possible.
The choice of paper proved to be a problem though. The question was how to find a brand of non-coated paper that could be printed on both sides without the text showing through.
The thickness of the paper was another aspect we needed to take into account. To save on postage, we wanted to avoid using heavy paper, and our aim was to still be able to mail out two DIN A4 sheets for the price of a 55 eurocent stamp.
Working with our design agency, we managed to find a brand of paper called PlanoArt - an FSC-certified brilliant white paper, which, at a weight of 90 g/m², did not exceed the limits on postage we had set ourselves.
How to use short-lived datasheets effectively:
AMPEG Security Lighthouse is in a permanent state of growth as a result of the continual upgrades and add-ons we produce. We add new features every month, and this makes the datasheets we print very short-lived. It is effectively impossible for us to distribute a print run of 1000 product brochures to potential customers before the information becomes outdated.
However, since product extensions do not affect the basic functionality of the application, we managed to find a solution for distributing new information to sales prospects without wasting the outdated datasheets.
We decided to print the information on the basic functionality of the application on the front of the double-sided datasheets in a large run initially. And since we have our own high-end 4-color laser printer at AMPEG, we got the Marketing Dept. to design the contents on the reverse, and then print them on demand.
The senseless waste of outdated product sheets became a thing of the past, and we are now printing according to our immediate needs.
AMPEG has imposed two new policies on printed products as a result of the measures described above:
1.) Each printed product is to be printed on both sides.
2.) The paper used must be FSC-certified.