In regulated sectors, print goes out of date on a date somebody else decides. A product is withdrawn, a rate moves, approved wording gets revised, and every brochure sitting in a branch cupboard or in an adviser’s car boot is suddenly the wrong version.
That is a stock and distribution problem more than a printing one. It is also the part we spend most of our time on for clients who have branches, brokers, franchises or adviser networks to supply.
What we print for the sector
Firms in insurance and financial services rarely come to us with a single job. The list is usually mixed, recurring, and spread across sites:
- Product literature, brochures and summary documents (print literature and leaflets and brochures)
- Branch and adviser stationery, letterheads and compliment slips (stationery)
- Training manuals and onboarding packs for broker and adviser networks (training manuals)
- Branch point of sale, window graphics and display stands (POS and banners, signs and displays)
- Renewal, switching and acquisition mailings (direct mail)
- Forms, internal documents and day-to-day operational print
We source, proof, print, store and distribute all of it through one account with one contact, rather than a different supplier for each line and nobody holding the whole picture.
The old version is the expensive problem
The FCA’s consumer understanding outcome asks firms to make sure consumers “understand the information they are given and make timely and informed decisions”. Once approved wording has been revised, anything still in circulation carrying the old text belongs to the firm to sort out, not to the printer who produced it.
Which makes the useful question to ask a print partner something other than the unit price at 5,000. It is what happens to the 3,200 you did not use.
Print shorter runs, hold central stock
The standard trap is buying big for the unit price. Litho does get cheaper per copy as the run grows, so a year’s supply of brochures looks like sharp buying, right up until the wording changes in month four and the balance gets pulped.
For regulated literature we work the other way round. Shorter, more frequent runs, with stock held securely at our Derbyshire warehouse and called off as sites need it. Storage and stock management sit inside the print management package, so there is no separate warehousing arrangement to set up and no pallets to find room for behind a branch counter.
The cost picture is not what people expect. A slightly higher unit price on a short run usually beats a lower unit price on a run you end up writing off.
Let branches order, without letting them order the wrong thing
Decentralised ordering is where version control normally breaks. Someone at a site has last year’s PDF, sends it to a local printer, and it is in the window by Friday.
Our web-to-print portal closes that off. Templates are pre-approved and brand elements stay locked, so users amend only the text fields you allow and pick from an approved image library. Permissions restrict which products each user sees, what they can edit and how much they can order. Catalogues can be split by location or user group, so a branch in Derby sees its own list and not head office’s. Orders can trigger secondary approval for artwork or budget before anything reaches production.
Items run print on demand or come off call-off stock held at ours, and every order is trackable from submission through to delivery. There is more detail on how the portals work in our guide to ordering on-brand print across every site.
Rebrands, mergers and same-day switchovers
Consolidation is constant in this sector, and a rebrand is the hardest version-control job there is. Every site needs new stock on the same day, the old stock has to disappear on that same day, and the sites are not all the same size or shape.
That is a sequencing exercise rather than a print job. Working backwards from the switchover date, we set production so everything lands before it, hold it all here until release, then ship to every site together. Print campaign management covers that co-ordination, including artwork rollout across the full item list so nothing gets missed because it only existed in one region.
Withdrawing superseded stock
When a version is retired, the stock has to come back or be destroyed, and somebody has to know how much of it there was in the first place.
Because the stock sits with us rather than across forty sites, that is one instruction. We hold it, we know the quantity, and returns are handled as part of the service. Our third party logistics operation receives, organises and stores product, then picks, packs and dispatches it through couriers, so withdrawing a line runs the same way as issuing one. Print fulfilment and delivery is the same machinery pointed at the outbound side.
How it runs end to end
Design, source, proof, print, store, call off, deliver, withdraw.
Artwork can be produced in-house across the Adobe Creative Suite if you need it, or we work from your own files. See design for print for what we need supplied. Standard PDF proofs carry no charge. Buying is whole-market, which means access to trade-only suppliers and preferential rates rather than one press with its own fixed limitations, and it means the right production method for each item instead of everything forced onto the same kit.
Birch has been doing this since 1983. The operation is built around holding and moving other people’s print, not only producing it, which is the half of the job that regulated literature actually turns on.
Getting started
If you supply literature to a branch, broker or adviser network and version control currently runs on a spreadsheet and good intentions, get in touch through the contact page. Tell us what you print, how many sites receive it and how often the wording changes, and we will map out what is worth holding as stock and what is better run on demand.
