A print budget that makes sense for a small business

What to buy first

Cards, then signage, then anything else. Cards because they are the cheapest per contact of anything you can print. Signage because a shopfront works every day without further spend.

Brochures and catalogues come later, once you know what customers actually ask about — writing them too early means writing them twice.

Where the money gets wasted

Two mistakes account for most of it.

• Over-ordering to hit a price break, then discarding stock when details change.
• Printing prices into anything expensive. Put them on a cheap insert instead.

A sensible first-year split

For a small business spending modestly on print, a workable division looks something like this — adjusted for whether you are a shopfront or a service business that travels.

• Roughly half on signage and the shopfront, which works every day at no marginal cost.
• A quarter on cards and stationery.
• A quarter on promotional print, spent in waves across the year rather than all at once.

Reordering well

Keep the artwork files. Every reorder from an existing file is faster and involves no fresh design cost, and colour stays consistent because the same file goes to the same process.

Reorder before you run out rather than after. A rush order costs more in stress than in money, and the two-day production plus transit is not compressible by very much.

The specifications this applies to

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

• 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.
• Vinyl Banners — 305 × 305 mm finished, 25 mm bleed, 100 DPI minimum, from ₹40 per unit with a minimum of 10.

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.

Measuring whether it worked

Print is often written off as unmeasurable, which is only true if you make no effort. A distinct phone number, a QR pointing at a URL you control, or a code the customer has to mention all turn a print run into something you can count.

Do that once and the next order becomes a decision rather than a guess — you will know which piece produced enquiries and which produced nothing but a bill.