Opening a shop: everything you need printed

Before you open

These have to exist on day one.

• Shopfront signage and a launch banner.
• Visiting cards for whoever is on the floor.
• Bill book or GST-compliant invoices.
• Basic price and offer signage.

What can wait

Brochures, loyalty cards and packaging can all follow in month two, once you have met actual customers and know which questions they ask. Printing them beforehand means guessing, and guessing means reprinting.

Signage, which needs the longest lead

Shopfront signage is the one item that cannot slip, and it takes longer than everything else on the list. Measure the frontage properly, allow for the fixing method, and order it first.

Anything permanently outdoors should be specified with UV-stable ink. The saving from ordinary output is small and it fades visibly within a season under Indian sun.

The launch itself

A launch banner, a flyer drop in the immediate few streets, and an offer with a deadline covers most of what actually brings people through the door in week one.

Keep the flyer local. Response falls away sharply with distance for a physical shop, and printing five thousand to cover a wider area usually performs worse than two thousand concentrated nearby.

The specifications this applies to

For reference, here is how it works out on the products this comes up on most often.

• Vinyl Banners — 305 × 305 mm finished, 25 mm bleed, 100 DPI minimum, from ₹40 per unit with a minimum of 10.
• Standard Visiting Cards — 89 × 51 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹2 per unit with a minimum of 100.
• Flyers — 148 × 210 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹2.5 per unit with a minimum of 250.

Ordering

Every file is checked automatically before printing, so a mistake in any of this is caught while it can still be corrected rather than after a run is on paper.

Standard delivery is free to every PIN code in India — two working days to a metro, up to twelve to the islands — and prices include GST, so the figure on the product page is the figure charged. Add a GSTIN at checkout and the invoice carries it for input credit.

Working backwards from the date

Anything tied to a date should be ordered from the date backwards, not from today forwards. Take the event, subtract transit for the destination, subtract production, then subtract a few days for the round of artwork correction that almost always happens.

That last allowance is the one people leave out, and it is the one that turns a comfortable schedule into a rushed one.