The business card has been quietly written off many times over the last decade. QR codes replaced them, LinkedIn replaced them, Apple Wallet replaced them. In practice, none of that has quite happened. The good ones still get handed over at meetings, kept in wallets, pinned to noticeboards, and used to remember someone weeks later. It turns out a well-made piece of card can still do things a phone screen can't.
We've been printing business cards at our works in Llangefni since long before the internet was a thing, and we still print a lot of them. Some for family businesses ordering a hundred or two, some for larger institutions ordering thousands across a workforce. What follows is what we tell customers when they're ordering cards for the first time, or refreshing them after several years of the same design.
Walk into most small print shops in the UK today and you'll find a handful of digital presses, one or two staff, and a machine that comfortably handles a few thousand copies a week. That model works, and it's what a lot of short-run print has moved to.
Walk into our works in Llangefni and you'll find something different. Alongside the digital presses, two multi-colour Heidelberg litho presses. Big, precise, meant for real volume, and the machines the whole shop floor is built around.
Heidelberg presses have been in use here for longer than most of the current team have been employed. Every few years, we get asked (usually kindly) whether we've thought about replacing them with something newer or smaller. The answer has always been the same. We haven't, and here's why it still matters to the customer.