Owner Steve Winn

Hertfordshire firm Black Dog Digital has added a lucrative digitally-printed wallpaper service to its offering, partly through gaining a high profile licence.

Not everybody wants Doctor Who with his time-travelling Tardis and his female sidekick emblazoned on their wall, but there are those that do, and for every one of those, things can potentially get just a little better for Black Dog Digital.

The Ware, Herts-based company offers a wallpaper printing service using its Xeikon digital press, and it holds the exclusive licence to print a range of Doctor Who designs for the BBC. There are other regular customers too: Forbidden Planet, decorating materials supplier Brewers, and a number of independent bespoke wallpaper designers, all use Black Dog Digital. It makes up only about 10% of the company’s trade, but it’s a lucrative tenth, attracting margins far better than general commercial work. This is no vast, sprawling print enterprise either. 

Black Dog numbers just five people, including its owner Steve Winn, who joined it as an apprentice at the age of 16, still operates the digital press, and took on the reins of the company after a management buy-out around two and a half years ago. 

The digitally-printed wallpaper service started not with the BBC but with Tracy Kendall – one of those independent wallpaper designers mentioned. Steve Winn takes up the story.

‘Tracy designs her own wallpapers, and she was getting them printed in Germany. She got in touch with us five years ago and said she understood that we had a Xeikon. We had never done it before, and didn’t know how the press would perform, but we took the challenge. After some testing we started getting some really good results for her. The print was better because we had a newer machine. That’s how it started.’

There is quite a leap from working with a single independent designer to cracking the BBC and its hallowed Time Lord though. ‘Once I took the business over,’ he explained, ‘the first people I went to see were the BBC, and I said the Doctor Who wallpaper product will be amazing but rather than do a personalised product, we should sell a print on demand wallpaper service that can be made to measure or out of the box. They were so helpful.  They loved the idea. It makes it easy for people to pick and choose what they want to order without needing to have stock on the floor. We can keep things fresh as well: we just launched a lot of new  designs for Doctor Who.’

The Doctor Who designs are sold online through an Amazon seller site (Black Dog Murals), with a standard 10 feet by 8 feet size, and a five day turnaround.

There is also a possibility that the designs will become available through the BBC shop. The designs are printed on standard wallpaper stock, which Black Dog sources from Premier Paper. The company has written its own paper script for the Xeikon press to get the best results – better even than Xeikon’s own wallpaper script, said Mr Winn.

‘Lots of people are offering bespoke wallpaper services, but we are the only ones in the UK with a licence to do Doctor Who paper, and we won that with quality of product. There were a lot of Ts to cross and Is to dot. We have got the product, we now just have to focus on the marketing. We need to find that chain of stores that would be prepared to  do a trial, and we can offer them a print on demand product.’

While wallpaper is only a minor part of the company’s business, it is good margin work, which takes little press time, and little in terms of toner and paper consumption. As well as the standard sizes, Black Dog can produce made to measure wallpaper, which builds even greater margin into the job.

One wallpaper job might accrue £3000, and as Mr Winn points out, you would have to do a large number of the more everyday jobs to reach the same level of revenue. Wallpaper is also a useful conversation opener, he reports: ‘People come to us for the A4 landscape and concertina work that other Xeikon houses can do but when you meet a client for the first time the wallpaper is a nice introduction. People come to you and say: we’ve got this project, we need brochures etc. but we’re also interested in the wallpaper service. It’s something that we have developed here, that we have driven from the word go and had great success with, and it’s lovely to have.’

There are two key words to consider though: service and partnerships. ‘It’s all about service,’ Mr Winn continued. ‘If you can make people feel comfortable about what you are doing you will grow in a positive way. In production, I’m a big believer in making sure the client is up to date on every level of production. We send movie clips of the job running to clients by iPhone. They love it, because they know it’s being done. It’s a level of service that I would like from someone. We want people to be impressed by the quality of the job and the service.’

And on partnerships: ‘If you have got some really good partnerships you can grow quite nicely and that’s key. We work with good people and we are all working to the same ethic. That’s where we need to be and I think that’s where we are. The challenge we have is that it’s tough, the digital print game; the way to get better is to be diversifying all the time.’

There are numerous directions that Black Dog would like to take its wallpaper service in, such as family snaps. A great deal of marketing would be needed to make this work though. Another partnership venture is Wall Idols, which has just gone live. Fans can order wallpapers of the pop acts Little Mix and Union J through the website. TNA Wrestling is soon to be added.

The market is ever-changing, and not everything has the longevity of Doctor Who. Getting the right licence is important. Right now Peppa Pig is hugely popular, but next year, next month, something else could replace it.