Running a Business from Home | Home Business Magazine

There are quite a number of printers in Edinburgh, some small, and some very large. The smaller printers are not necessarily small because they are any less good than the larger ones, but because they perhaps don’t have the space to install more machinery, nor maybe the means to purchase it. A printing machine of any description is going to cost a lot of money. For instance, a quick search showed a Heidelberg off-set machine first used in 2011 that is on sale second-hand for £145,000. And that is just one machine. Some of the larger printers have all sorts of different machines for different jobs such as wide-format printing, banner printing, poster printing, and so on.

Some printers can print on canvas, so you can have a print of anything you wish put on to canvas, then give it a frame, and you have, to all intents and purposes, a nice original painting to hang on the wall.

What about flags? You see flags hanging outside quite a number of business premises such as gyms, shops, petrol stations, and more, advertising their wares, and these are usually digitally printed on to material. They can be designed and printed in any shape or size and are then sewn using an industrial sewing machine: so there is another big cost for the printer – purchasing an industrial sewing machine.

Then there is laminating. This is a great way to preserve health and safety posters, photographs, plans, drawings, certificates you have been awarded, and so on. That, of course, requires the printer to have a laminating machine that is capable of laminating anything from size A4 up to size A0.

How about binding in Edinburgh? If you are a university student, you will need your thesis bound in order to present it correctly. You might also need bookbinding. There are several different types of binding such as wire binding, which is the university standard, plastic comb binding, hard back binding, soft back binding, plastic side binding, and so on. Obviously, this will require the use of a binding machine.

Maybe you are a golf pro and run a golf shop at the local golf club. Now a very profitable side-line could be golf umbrellas. But you don’t want any old golf umbrellas. Why not have your golf umbrellas printed with the club name and logo? You will sell a lot more umbrellas like that. However, you need a printer that can print the umbrellas for you.

T-shirts. Heavens above, you can make some money selling T-shirts! Some people do nothing other than design T-shirts and then sell them online on sites such as Etsy and eBay. OK, if you are going to create your own designs you have to have the skill to do that, but there are plenty of other ways to get hold of designs that you can use. Then all you need is a printer who can print the T-shirts for you. Obviously, you will only want a small run to start with, in order to see how well they sell, but if they start to fly off the shelves you will need a printer who can turn them out fast. If you have several different designs on sale at the same time you need a printer who can handle the capacity, bearing in mind that a T-shirt printer will be printing T-shirts for other customers as well.

Mugs. How do you print on a china mug? Yet all sorts of organisations sell printed mugs to their members or customers. For instance, The Dogs Trust has a yellow mug which it sells to members with a dog (obviously) printed on it. A brewery in Suffolk has a mug with a photo of their brewery, which is in a lovely old building out in the countryside with a small pond in front of it, printed on it. You could produce your own range of mugs if you can find a printer who can print them for you.

Yes, despite the fact that we live in the digital age, and partly because of it, the printed word is fine and well and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.