As the snow settles on the slopes in Whistler, Canada, the organising committee will be able to reflect on a highly successful Winter Olympic Games. The nation topped the medals chart with the icing on the cake coming via a last gasp winner against bitter rivals America in the ice hockey final.
One group of individuals who didn’t make it to the winner’s podium but were just as integral to the game’s success were Canada’s print and design community. Their skill and artistry was seen by millions of TV viewers across the globe.
From the advertising hoardings printed on durable substrates that lined the slopes and endured horrific wintery conditions, through to some rather nifty creative ideas in downtown Vancouver, such as an ordinary bus shelter that was transformed into a ski lift as part of a campaign for health drink company Vitaminwater.
Another highly visible and highly successful triumph for printers, and not just of Canadian ilk, was the brightly coloured printed skis and snowboards used by the athletes. With winter sports enjoying a boom thanks in large part to the Winter Olympics and unseasonably heavy downfalls of snow across Europe, printing high resolution digital designs onto skis and snowboards is providing a healthy revenue stream for some canny wide-format printers – they’re also making a tidy sum printing onto kite boards, wake boards and skate boards.
It’s such a profitable sideline that one Austrian screen printer has made it a core part of its business offer building a 50-employee company off the back of its ski printing service (it even prints images for curling stones!)
But you don’t have to be a large company, or based in ski-mad Austria, to make a go of it. Ski printing is something that a small wide-format printing company could offer just as easily as a large outfit. You can utilise your own press, put in place a front-end that includes a web-2-print online store and employ some basic search engine optimisation tricks on Google to make sure that your business features high up the list when a potential customer searches for ‘ski printing’.
Thinking outside the box and taking your company into areas where it hasn’t traditionally trod – or indeed skied – may fill many business owners with trepidation, especially as the global economy slowly but surely emerges from recession, but branching out into areas such as ski printing is another way to keep your existing kit busy and it may make all the difference between your business hurtling down a slippery slope or putting one step on the winner’s podium.
