Little Bit of Savings Adds Up
A Little Bit Here,
A Little Bit There
This example shows how carefully planning your paper purchases can help you trim dollars from printing and mailing costs.
1) Calculating total useable square inches for a catalog measuring 81⁄8˝ x 107⁄8˝, consisting of 72 pages plus four pages of cover, gives you 6,715 square inches of printable space. If the inside pages are 30-pound lightweight coated no. 5 and the cover is a 60-pound sheet, each catalog weighs 3.5716 ounces. That's a bit too heavy to meet the U.S. Postal Service piece rate threshold of 3.3087 ounces.
2) If the publisher reduces the trim height to 101⁄2˝ and lowers the text basis weight to 28-pound, the new piece weight will be 3.2415 ounces—within the "magic" weight. That reduces the cost of paper and postage from $80.24/sq. inch to $78.16/sq. inch.
Now this might not seem like a lot, but if this cataloger mails 1.5 million catalogs monthly, the combined postage and paper savings could amount to $384,000 per year. Take into account the improved press performance of three percent, which certain papers can deliver, and this customer is approaching an annual savings of $500,000.
—Tim Cronin
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- Tim Cronin