Building Digital Bridges

Fingerhut’s catalog production burdens are eased by developing mutually beneficial partnerships

With print runs between 10,000 and 5 million—and product images that number in the hundreds of thousands—it is no surprise that Fingerhut, a Minnetonka, MN-based general-merchandising cataloger, required additional production support.

Two years ago, while analyzing its prepress needs, Fingerhut looked to Quad/Graphics’ Digital Imaging Division, Minneapolis, to support Fingerhut’s own prepress division and digital photography studio, both housed in nearby Minnesota locales. Initially, what made Quad’s digital division appealing was Fingerhut’s long-established relationship with Quad/Graphics, one of the cataloger’s print partners.

Fingerhut’s prepress volume caused the catalog publisher to analyze how integral its prepress partner would become to its production process. As Michael Hasselstrom, Fingerhut’s manager of creative technical support, recalls, “Fingerhut consciously made a decision that we didn’t want to build a [prepress] Taj Mahal. … For us, there was a benefit to working with Quad/Graphics.” Fingerhut viewed its potential relationship with Quad as one that would ease some of the in-house prepress burdens. At the same time, Fingerhut analyzed Quad’s stature in the industry and was quite pleased by the printer/prepress vendor’s reputation. A partnership with the highly regarded vendor gave Fingerhut the added assurance that prepress would be in good hands with Quad.

Acting as a full-service prepress provider, Quad’s digital imaging facility backs up Fingerhut’s corporately owned prepress shop by scanning and converting transparencies to digital form and reformatting digital images for print and Web output, as well as page creation.

With several print production partners all interacting to create Fingerhut’s catalogs, communication between publisher, prepress firms, photography studio and printer became vital. To help facilitate communication, T1 lines were installed to allow for electronic data exchange between the key players.

A Creative repository

In a thriving digital industry, asset management has moved to the forefront of catalog production as a key business and workflow concern; Fingerhut experienced its own asset-management growing pains and began looking for more sophisticated method to care for its plethora of images and corresponding metadata.

“Fingerhut wanted a single repository for all our high-resolution images,” recalls Hasselstrom. “We wanted Quad to house the images until a time when we could bring that function in house.”

To meet Fingerhut’s archiving needs, Quad’s Digital Imaging Division currently provides a home for all Fingerhut images—those scanned at Quad, Fingerhut’s own prepress firm and those submitted in digital form by the cataloger’s digital photography studio—in a central database.

Still, Fingerhut required some control over the high-resolution images’ low-res counterparts for comping pages and proofing. To manage these images, Fingerhut employs TeleScope from North Plains Systems, Mississauga, ON, Canada. With TeleScope, low-res versions are uploaded by the original scanning firm, allowing the cataloger to search images using SKUs, Fingerhut-designated asset numbers and several more metadata-specific methods. Internal and external asset management solutions interface, to allow for seamless low-res/high-res exchanges.

“Before [implementing digital asset management], the information about each image was available through a mainframe,” Hasselstrom recalls. “We’d have to dig through product codes and walk over to a file cabinet to pull out a piece of film. And, of course, there might be eight different versions of one product.

“Now, we can search by SKU number, by image type, by the unique asset number that we’ve given [an image], and retrieval is instantaneous,” concludes Hasselstrom.

Partnering with both Quad/Graphics and North Plains Systems (which customized TeleScope to fit Fingerhut’s specific production needs), implementation of digital asset management was fairly painless. With asset management in place, Hasselstrom estimates that image retrieval occurs 75 percent to 95 percent faster.

Lean on me

The prosperity of Fingerhut’s partnership with Quad, quantified by the success of its digital asset management system, also allotted other benefits.

According to Hasselstrom, Quad’s stature in the industry was paramount. With Quad’s extensive facilities network, Fingerhut was assured that a problem at its current Quad facility would not disrupt the catalog’s production. “With all their other facilities,” Hasselstrom explains, “Quad always has a back up.”

Similarly, Quad’s quality control procedures were equally as attractive, Hasselstrom points out. In-house and Quad-based proofing devices (Kodak Approvals) are monitored and calibrated on a weekly basis, allowing for consistent printing. Periodic document testing has been put into place to ensure that the potential buyer can never detect a quality discrepancy, Hasselstrom adds.

“When we were looking at Quad’s digital hub a couple of years ago,” recalls Hasselstrom, “we asked two questions: ‘Where is Quad in the industry today?’ and ‘Where does Fingerhut want to be positioned in the industry today and tomorrow?’” With similar proactive views on print production, Fingerhut and Quad were a good match.

Hasselstrom adds that Fingerhut benefits from Quad’s own industry relationships with companies such as Adobe and Quark.

Because Quad/Graphics has acted as a driving force for the advent of digital production in the catalog marketing industry, all of its clients ultimately benefit from its expertise as well. For example, Quad’s print and digital imaging divisions have played a major role in Fingerhut’s move to computer-to-plate and computer-to-cylinder manufacturing.

“It isn’t like we consider Quad a vendor,” Hasselstrom says, affirming the importance of the company’s role. “We think of Quad as a partner in our internal processes.”