Print quality & QC
Print quality, from issue 1 to issue 100
Bespoke means your envelope is spec’d from scratch (stocks, formats, finishes). Factory-grade means the spec then holds: same paper, same colour, every issue after it.
Stocks, formats, finishes
There is no catalogue and no template pack. What goes in your envelope is spec’d from scratch, which means your £-per-unit is a direct read-out of four decisions, and you make them with samples in your hand rather than from a dropdown.
- Weight
- Measured in gsm, and the first thing a subscriber feels before they have read a word. A flyer, a card and a cover-weight print are three different papers doing three different jobs. Heavier costs more per unit, and it spends the weight you have to play with before an envelope stops being a letter at 100g.
- Surface
- Uncoated takes ink softly and feels like stationery: it is what handwriting, riso-adjacent art and anything meant to be written on wants. Silk holds photographic detail and keeps colour saturated. Plenty of club envelopes deliberately carry both.
- Format
- Trimmed sizes, folds, and how the finished set stacks in the envelope. Format is where letter-rate engineering begins, long before anything reaches a press.
- Speciality touches
- Die-cut shapes cut on our Veloblade digital die-cutter, with finishing handled in-house on the Duplo finishing line rather than sent out to a third party and hoped for.
What we will not do is publish a finishes menu and invite you to order from it. On a sample round we will tell you what suits your envelope, what each choice does to your per-unit cost, and, just as usefully, what we would not spec at all.
QC on every issue
Every issue goes through the same four checks, in the same order. The point of writing them down is that they do not depend on who is on shift.
Step 1
A proof you sign off
Nothing runs because a file looked fine on a screen. You approve the proof (colour, trim, the set as a whole), and that approval is what the run is measured against.
Step 2
A calibrated press
Your issue prints on the Ricoh Pro C9500 digital press, colour-calibrated so the same artwork gives the same result this month as it did last month.
Step 3
An issue-zero reference sample
Once your spec is settled we keep a physical reference sample of it (the agreed stocks, the agreed colour), filed against your club, not against a job number.
Step 4
Per-run checks against it
Every run after that is checked on the floor against your reference sample. Not against a memory of what it looked like, and not against the file.
It is unglamorous work, and it is the whole reason a club can promise the same thing issue after issue. You are welcome to come and watch it happen in Wembley, London.
No off months
Subscribers forgive a lot. They forgive a postbox that swallowed a week; they do not forgive an issue that feels like it came from somewhere else.
Same stocks, same colour, issue 1 to issue 100. The reference sample is what turns that from a hope into a process, and it is why we would rather spend the time spec’ing carefully with you at the start than change things month to month.
If something in your spec ever has to move (a stock discontinued at the mill, say), you hear it from us first, with samples of the alternative, before it reaches a single subscriber.
We earn next month's run by delivering this month's.
See it before you commit
What does print cost per envelope?
It depends on what is in the envelope and how many you are printing, and it falls as your club grows.
Setup is much the same whether a run is small or large, so the smallest clubs carry the highest cost per envelope. From there, every volume price break is real money back into your margin: we quote the whole run, per issue, and the per-unit number drops as your subscriber list climbs. Your growth improving your margin is the alignment we want, and it is why there is no commission on top.
You will not find a number on this page, and there is no calculator here on purpose. A per-unit price only means anything once the spec and the run size are real, so it comes out of a conversation and a sample round, not a dropdown that guesses at your club.
For the shape of it beforehand, the worked examples for clubs of 100, 500 and 2,000 subscribers carry a full cost stack (print, postage and platform fees) with the price-break effect visible across the three.
The quality chapter is yours
What to spec, what it costs, and how to brief a printer: the playbook's quality chapter is the checklist we use ourselves.
- Niches & the envelope
- Pricing & the real cost stack
- Scaling past 500