Inline printing makes truly striking, personalized printed pieces possible, in a time frame that has a quicker turn around than multi-step printing processes. Your piece can be printed, imaged, cut, folded, glued, die cut and perforated – all in a single economical print run.

To help you better understand what’s possible with inline printing, here are two recent customer examples of this advanced web printing technology in action:

Example #1: A hearing aid mailer

The challenge: A hearing aid manufacturer wanted to send a direct mailer with two gift cards to its customers. Each card needed to be personalized with its customers’ nearest local store. The customer’s address also needed to be printed on the other side, along with all proper postal markings.

The solution: McAdams worked with the customer to devise a low-cost direct mailing solution that required little or no handling, from printing to mailing. Rather than fugitive glue the cards to the mailer, McAdams designed the direct mail piece so the cards were integrated into its design, with a shallow relief perforated die cut.

The data file contained the detail we needed to personalize the mailing for each recipient directing them to their closest store. The store addresses were inline printed onto one side of each card, while the customer’s mailing address was custom printed on the other side. McAdams’ inline digital printer outputs black ink at 600 dpi, making this custom data indistinguishable from the rest of the web-printed design.
While running these mailers in one pass, we maintained and checked the data on the front and the back sides to verify that the card data matched the mailing data. The pieces were folded and closed using Post-it note glue.

Postage and indicia were also printed in the same pass, so the pieces were immediately ready to be sorted and then mailed. Because of the large quantity of pieces involved in this project, McAdams arranged with a transfer trucking firm to ship the cards to local post offices around the U.S., which then delivered them to consumer homes, driving the postage costs down for the end customer.

Thanks to the design input of the McAdams team, this manufacturer was able to conduct a very large mailing to consumers throughout the U.S., at a surprisingly affordable cost.

Example #2: A home improvement service

The challenge: This large retail customer needed to publish a coupon book for its home improvement division. This book covered numerous services, including kitchen remodeling, window and door replacements, roofing and siding. It needed to provide each service with adequate attention, but not overwhelm consumers with information.

The solution: McAdams worked closely with the customer to design an interactive leaf-through booklet using “step-down” pages. Each page was a different size, giving the open edge of the piece a tab-like appearance. This enabled consumers to see each service in bold lettering and immediately turn to its page to learn more.

McAdams provided the page specifications; the customer used this data to scale its artwork to match each page’s space requirements. McAdams worked closely with the customer to select a layout and fonts that would result in an attractive, easy-to-skim design.

On the inline press, the pieces were folded once and then cold line glued along the backbone. This format is easy to do inline, but much harder to do with traditional bindery processes, where maintaining proper page-to-page alignment becomes a major challenge.

The result was a great-looking booklet that made it easy for customers to zero in on the home improvement services they needed.

We love complex printed pieces

Do you have an idea for a printed piece that requires printing, personalization, cutting, folding, gluing, die cutting or perforations? Are you concerned about the potential cost of these attention-getting enhancements? You may be able to achieve the look you imagine with quick production turn times, at an affordable price – with inline printing.

Contact us today to discuss your printing challenges.