Getting Away from It All
First, there was the studio, then the den, the garage, and now the “man cave” or in-house salon. Humans have always gravitated to areas where they can get away, relax, and often focus on something of interest. Be it for pleasure or for purpose, those getaway spaces are areas of fascination and creativity for many, and even now they are actively sought after by a huge portion of the public.
With the digital world being what it is today, such getaway spaces seem to be almost needed. Our communication technology has made us more dependent on retreating into a world where we can apply our senses and/or skills in earnest. In fact, it’s becoming an almost integral part of many areas of the professional world today.
This is an asset if you are working within any facet of product fulfillment. You can accomplish two tasks at once: building a digital studio that can allow you to apply your own creativity while being away from the outside world, and bringing in outside parties that might want you to use your skills to better their own ventures. Welcome to the new digital studio format: it’s a place you can build on your own to accommodate your personal interests while satisfying the interests of others.
The word “studio” conjures up some unpleasant images in peoples’ minds, such as huge mechanical rigs that seem to be mandatory, a need to shell out for big studio space, studios that become dark places and lead people into self-imposed madness. But these are the old-school studio ideas: digital studios for product fulfillment pros are much better than these images, and twice as easy to create.
Creating a Go-To Refuge
First, you need space and gear: you need to have your tools somewhere you can work from and that others can access. It’s sort of a go-to refuge for you to work, but also for others to come and visit to see what you have. You can work out of your home, but having a regular studio space or a dedicated area within your office where you do your product fulfillment business may be better. See what your budget allows.
Going a step beyond the laptop analogy for a minute, if you’re heading down the route of offering professional digital printing services, especially on-demand digital printing services, you ought to have some good memory units to help you out. An extra external hard drive will likely be necessary in order to house all of your programs and clients’ information. Most of these hard drives now come with the FireWire transfer system and are readily portable, should you ever have to move them or take them to a third party to print content.
The second part is the programs themselves. There’s a need to be ready to perform creative direct marketing, and you must ensure you have the right programs to make this happen. For your clients who want digital printing solutions, make sure you have the programs to design the materials they might want, namely text and graphics editing interfaces, pagination programs, and image manipulation programs. The clients will want nice catalogues, flyers, and/or other marketing materials, so you need to have the right tools to pull them all off under one roof.
The Condensed Version
With so many people working off laptops to do everything from DJing to video editing to document configuration, all while sitting in a café sipping espresso, the notion that digital studios are huge, complex, and expensive is unnecessary. A good digital product fulfillment studio fits into this “café” concept. It only requires some necessary planning and construction to use it professionally and successfully.
Need solutions to your product fulfillment problems? APS Fulfillment, Inc has the knowledge and services to make your direct mail and product fulfillment ventures more successful. Contact APS Fulfillment, Inc by e-mail at [email protected], visit their web site at www.apsfulfillment.com, or phone at (954) 582-7450.
