Down-home Digital

Country Store catalog is a home-improvement success story with a high-tech twist.

The catalog is produced by Reiman Publications, Greendale, WI, which was founded by Roy Reiman in 1964 as a magazine publishing company. In the early 1970s, Reiman launched Farm Wife News magazine and began offering “I’m Proud to be a Farm Wife” T-shirts at cost to promote the publication.

The shirts were so popular that Reiman executives realized the company could sell the garments for a profit. Reiman expanded the brand, adding “I’m Proud to be a Farmer’s Daughter” and “I’m Proud to be a Country Boy” versions, among others.

Soon Reiman had a booming mail-order business that evolved into Country Store catalog.

Today, Country Store boasts about 500,000 12-month buyers of more than 400 country-oriented products, such as apparel, housewares, kitchen accessories, cookbooks, gardening tools and various outdoors-oriented items, reports John LeBrun, Reiman senior vice president. The catalog’s tagline: “The General Store That Fits in Your Mailbox.”

Last year, Reiman mailed 7.3 million Country Store catalogs, along with 65 million supplements polybagged with each of Reiman’s 12 family-oriented magazines. That stable of titles still includes Farm Wife News, now published as Country Woman. All of Reiman’s other business segments and spin-offs—magazine publishing, book publishing, travel services and cooking schools—complement and, in many cases, propagate catalog sales.

Most of last year’s catalog orders were placed via mail (54 percent) and telephone (39 percent), according to LeBrun. The Country Store Web site, which is at CountryStoreCatalog.com, launched in October 1999, averages 100 orders per day.

Country Store catalogs are published spring and fall, each release averaging 50 to 70 pages. Supplements are distributed year-round. A typical catalog production cycle lasts about three months, starting with a product-selection meeting.

Once the items are determined, the team works on image acquisition. That task has been streamlined since Reiman added an in-house digital photography studio.

Time & Money Saved

The company purchased the technology—two Sinar p2 view cameras with 23 Sinarback digital back systems, all from Sinar Bron Imaging—in March 2000, and was up and running by October.

“We knew that implementing digital photography would save us time and money,” states Anne Schimmel, photo studio manager.

“With conventional photography, it takes a minute or two to shoot a Polaroid, whereas a digital preview takes seconds, and you can put it up on a monitor using Photoshop to see the image in a layout,” she continues. “Plus, each Polaroid costs $2.65. We can shoot as many digital previews as necessary, and we have much more freedom to try changes.”

Schimmel reports similar savings from the removal of film and processing from the equation. “Exposing six sheets of film in the traditional setting takes five to six minutes, so we’re saving all of that time,” she calculates. “Also, if the final film pickup of the day was at 4 p.m., we wouldn’t have it back until the next day at 1 p.m. Now we capture the image, send it to prepress, and an FPO [for placement only image] is available immediately. Prepress no longer has to scan images.”

Reiman employs two in-house photographers plus freelancers to shoot the images for the magazines and catalogs. Photography for the magazines has priority, since there are so many titles, and they’re published more frequently.

Shooting the numerous products for each catalog requires some smart scheduling. “We shoot Country Store primarily on evenings and weekends,” Schimmel reports. “The Fall 2001 catalog took 12 full days of shooting, producing 40 images per day. Clothing not shown on models took an additional five days, 30 images a day.”

Technology Selection

Company executives had been considering a move to digital

photography for a while, but they waited until the technology had improved.

“We tested systems as far back as five or six years ago, but we were never quite satisfied with the quality of the technology,” remembers Mike Sloane, vice president of prepress operations at Reiman. “It was the latest chip factor that put us over the top—knowing we could get quality using one- or multishot photography.”

Schimmel adds, “We were already using Sinar equipment and were very happy with it, so it was a no-brainer to stay with [the brand]. With the Sinar digital systems, we can shoot in one- or four-shot mode and get excellent quality either way. We’re using the one-shot as much as possible because it’s faster.”

Reiman purchased the Sinar digital camera systems from Global Imaging, Denver, which also helped educate the photographers, editors, artists and prepress staff about the new technology.

Cooperation among the photography studio, graphic artists and the prepress staff has been a critical part of the overall digital workflow success. Reiman has been handling design and prepress in house since 1991, Sloane says. Presently, the staff comprises 15 people who handle prepress for all of the company’s operations.

“We’re fortunate that prepress is right across the hall from us,” Schimmel says.

The Workflow

While the studio shoots the images, Mike Lehtinen, art director for Country Store, begins working on a catalog layout in QuarkXPress. He designs page spreads and sends them to the writer for copy. Then he prints each spread on a black-and-white laser printer and routes them to the proofreader, merchandising team, creative director and LeBrun for approvals.

“The addition of digital photography has facilitated the layout, design and copywriting process,” Lehtinen says. “Now, I can get images within a couple of hours. In the past, I’d have to design using boxes as place-holders, which were hard to write around.”

Each spread typically undergoes three or four rounds of proofing and corrections. Once 10 to 15 page spreads have been approved, Lehtinen hands off the files to the prepress staffers across the hall, who pull proofs on two Kodak Approvals, installed four and two years ago.

The Approval, from Kodak Polychrome Graphics, is a high-end digital halftone color proofer. Why did Reiman decide to go high-end (and higher priced) in house?

“One of our printing partners pulled us into CTP [computer-to-plate technology] early, and, at that time, the Approval was probably the only proofer we had confidence in,” Sloane says. “Yes, we’re paying a premium price [per proof], but we trust the proofer’s consistency. It’s an accurate proof, and we hit our color on press.”

Color management is an ongoing, joint effort, according to Sloane. “I assigned a prepress person to work with the photographers to keep everything in line,” he says, noting that the company uses CreoScitex ColorShop software to manage color. “There’s a different look to digital photography,” he notes. “It’s actually sharper, so we had to do some adjusting for sharpness and depth.”

For media asset management, Reiman has used FLEXSTORdb (from FLEXSTOR, a Rorke Data spin-off) for more than three years. “Asset management came hand-in-hand with our move to a server-based workflow,” Sloane recalls. “With digital photography, we really need to organize our images. With FLEXSTORdb, it’s like putting everything into a digital filing cabinet. Repurposing and reusing assets becomes a lot easier. It’s hard to measure the time savings, but it’s there.”

Once files are final, the company uses a CreoScitex PS/M workflow to RIP files and convert them through Shira technology into separated DCS files, Sloane explains. Staffers proof the RIPed files, then send the files to Reiman’s catalog printer, Arandell Corp., Menomonee Falls, WI, on CDs. Country Store catalogs are produced CTP on CreoScitex platesetters.

Although a staff representative is typically on hand for a press check, Reiman does not get any proofs from the printer after the files are sent. “We know that the integrity of each file is good because that’s what we proofed,” Sloane says.

Dawn Greenlaw is a freelance writer who covers the prepress/printing industry, specializing in digital production workflow. Previously, she was the managing editor of Printing Impressions magazine.