A Quick Response
(That’s the Company’s Bag)
(That’s the Company’s Bag)
It’s 4:30 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 24,
and Wayne Prasertong just received a call from Sunrise
Identity. The Woodinville, Wash., company needs 6,400 newspaper
bags printed and shipped by Friday. Prasertong, who sells a
bevy of bags dubbed Awesome Line, says yes to the order in a
hurry. His usual turnaround time for a project is two to three
weeks—still fast—but this job redefines “rush
order” for his 2-year old company, Art Wayne Marketing
Inc., Monrovia, Calif. “That’s probably our
forté—that we can get work done really
fast,” says Prasertong, the distributorship’s
president.
Sunrise Identity offers corporate branded
merchandise, screenprinting, private label clothing,
promotional marketing and package design services to a wide
range of firms. One of its clients, an event planning company,
needed the bags for its client, Microsoft Corp. The software
giant planned to distribute the bags at an MSN Superbowl event
the following weekend. “Our client originally wanted
rubberbands to go around newspaper-like marketing materials for
their event,” says Nikki Ozaki-Simpson, sales coordinator
for Sunrise Identity. “At the last minute, the rubberband
vendor told us they couldn’t meet our in-hands date, so
we needed another solution for distributing these
‘newspapers.’ We suggested the newspaper bags to
the client, and they liked the idea.”
Prasertong quickly coordinated with his
production team at the Southern California-based factory where
Awesome Line bags are produced and printed. The actual
production time was only about four hours, but there’s a
lot of up-front time involved in making plates and coordinating
a schedule with the printer for each project. To make up for
the crunch, Prasertong charged a typical rush fee.
Perhaps Prasertong can deliver top-notch
products on a tight turnaround because he’s a 20-year
veteran in the bag biz. After working for an advertising
company for several years, he landed a job with a bag
manufacturer as coordinator between the art and production
departments. Later, he became the national sales and
marketing manager before leaving to launch Art Wayne Marketing
at the end of 2002. His three independent salespeople moved
with him. As the company’s president, Prasertong
usually handles “hot jobs” himself, he says.
So would Sunrise Identity work with
Prasertong again after the Superbowl bag blitz? Absolutely,
says Buffie Zwicker, the company’s sales coordinator.
“He was very accommodating in the fact that we had given
him two original ship-to addresses, and then one of those
changed. He was able to keep up with the change and get the
bags to the right locations and on time.”
Although Prasertong and his client hit
their deadlines, they made another switch and distributed the
bags at another launch event rather than at the Superbowl
affair as planned. All that matters to Prasertong, though, is
that he was able to deliver the product on time: “What
I’m hoping for is that they’re happy with the
project, they’re happy with the service and they will
give me a call again.”
—Sarah Whitman
Tips for Time Crunches
No matter how far you plan ahead,
sometimes a project falls through and you have to scramble for
a backup in a hurry. If you need a rush job, you have ways to
make the process smooth. After all, the happier you make your
vendor, the more likely you’ll get the results you want.
• Make sure you have all the details
before contacting the vendor. Otherwise, the vendor may not be
able to determine whether he can do the job. Gather information
such as how many copies of the product you need, what type of
artwork you’ll supply, where the product should be
shipped and when it needs to arrive. The less back-and-forth
communication, the more time you’ll save.
• Plan to work as quickly as the
vendor. “It pretty much has to be one, two, three,
four—everything has to fall in place. There’s just
no going back,” says Wayne Prasertong, president of Art
Wayne Marketing Inc., Monrovia, Calif. That means you have to
keep moving and accept limitations, just as you expect from the
vendor. You’ll probably have to choose from standard
styles and processes and may have to forgo seeing a proof.
• Keep the artwork simple. Be sure to
check the quality of your art files and send a mock-up if you
don’t have time to see a proof.
• Look for
vendors who specialize in quick turnaround. “We provide different types of
bags for distributors who need bags in a hurry,” Prasertong says. “Toward
the end of last year, I had another job in which the customer called on
Christmas Eve. They wanted the bags shipped on the 29th, with Christmas in
between. And we got them done.”
Working on a tight deadline, Art
Wayne Marketing Inc., Monrovia, Calif., provided this bag to Sunrise
Identity, a Woodinville, Wash., firm that works with Microsoft Corp. The
software giant used the bag at a launch event.
© 2005Print
Solutions Magazine
