Simplifying a process: Melbourne Photograph, Printed in Chicago, Delivered to Brooklyn
Over the past couple of months I’ve been working hard on the website: fleshing out collections, thinking about how people move through the site, and paying closer attention to where my traffic comes from.
It wasn’t especially surprising that some visits were coming from the US, but the fact that they were consistently around fifty percent was harder to ignore. I’ve had various print enquiries and sales in Australia recently, and given the traffic pattern, I felt I needed to be prepared for the possibility of selling prints in the US.
In Australia, I trust Image Science in Melbourne implicitly. They’ve produced beautiful work for me since about 2009, across two owners, and I know what to expect from them: careful handling, archival papers, excellent colour, and a serious understanding of fine art printing. If I was going to sell into the US, I needed to find something comparable that could work entirely remotely.
I chose Chicago as a hub partly because I was born there, and partly because its central location may help with shipping across the country. After searching for fine art and giclée printers in the Chicagoland area, I found Printlab. I emailed with a few questions, they responded promptly and clearly, and I decided to run a small test.
The process was straightforward. I prepared a file, sent it through, and soon had a tracked package moving from Chicago to a friend in Brooklyn. The aim was to make ordering and fulfilment for a US buyer feel as simple as it does for someone in Australia.
One small complication was paper sizing. The US has retained non-ISO paper sizes, while my Australian prints are based around A4, A3 and A2. Maintaining the same crop and printable area matters to me, because even small changes to the crop can alter how an image feels. I had initially expected I might need to adjust the files, but Printlab was willing to cut paper to ISO size, which meant the US and Australian versions could remain consistent.
The bigger reason for producing prints in the US is to avoid sending fragile paper prints halfway around the world from Melbourne. International shipping is expensive, slow, and hard on the work. A print travelling from Melbourne to the US has to pass through too many stages, and that increases both cost and risk.
This test was about reducing that friction. If a print can be produced carefully in the US, on archival paper, with consistent sizing and professional handling, then the experience for a US buyer becomes much more practical.
I still need to order a copy for myself so I can compare the paper, colour and finish directly against my Australian prints. But as a first remote fulfilment test, the process with Printlab was smooth and encouraging. Take a look at the US Store
