When they opened their doors in the mid 1980s, Slate Group wasn’t that different from many other commercial printers. They focused on a fairly traditional business model — customers submit a quote request or project and the job is printed, often with little collaboration with the customer on how to enhance the project.
What was missing from the equation was creativity and inspiration, being a true partner with customers and using the company’s print expertise to inspire clients to take their print projects to the next level.
Slate Group’s Director of Sales and Marketing Trey Laverty believes this was the key ingredient that changed the game and created a stronger, more nationally recognizable brand for Slate Group.
“We recognized that everybody could print well,” Laverty says. “We had to be more creative and focus on the creative side of print. We used creativity and inspiration to change our whole sales strategy, to change our whole culture, really. We’re marketers who work through print and we lean more into the inspiration side of things.”
This pivot also centered on the idea of community, on cultivating a band of customers who also prized creativity and collaboration and who wanted to share ideas in service of exploring what can be achieved in the print medium. Laverty believes that once word spread about the highly creative community they were building, that’s when things really took off.
“People started coming to us looking for ideas,” says Laverty. “They would start asking us, how do we do this, or how do we do that? And this is where we can really have fun, where we get to really trick-up these projects.”
Laverty also says the company’s culture shift along with more creative or design-focused inquiries from clients have been contagious, pushing everyone in the company to start each job from a place of how to elevate the project, whether that’s through unique folds, finishings, dimension, inks or choice of paper.
“We now have our production people coming to us with their ideas of how to do some really cool, creative stuff with jobs,” Laverty explains. “They tell me I can do this with this machine, or I can do that with that machine, and that’s what has really grown our brand.”
But this next level of creativity and emphasis on inspiration is only part of the picture — you have to have the right tools at your disposal to make inspiration a reality. Bringing a diverse fleet of presses and finishing equipment in-house has helped them offer end-to-end production that’s faster, more efficient and more cost-effective than their competitors.
“It’s one thing to recognize that creativity is the driving force to produce engaging print marketing collateral, but to actually see that growth we had to commit to growing our in-house production,” explains Laverty. “For example, embellishments are really hot right now and that’s something you usually have to send out for. We can do it in-house in a faster and more efficient way.”
One doesn’t have to look too hard at Slate Group’s body of work to see the fruits of their labor.
Innovative approaches to die cutting and folds help build suspense as each panel reveals part of a brand story or messaging.
Finishings and embellishments help create more interactive print pieces that better engage the audience.
This desire to be a source of inspiration and creativity — as well as a provider of high-quality commercial print – has helped Slate Group grow to more than 125 full-time employees with a new print facility totaling more than 100,000 square feet. And they even host their own annual print and design conference called Print Inspired, an event that draws print industry professionals from across the country.
“We had about 200 people at the last one,” Laverty says. “We talk about marketing, we get nerdy about paper, it’s a really fun, exciting time.”
Lubbock, Texas may not be considered the epicenter of design and print innovation, but with Slate Group holding down the fort, it may just be a matter of time.
Accent® Opaque is the perfect paper to pair with the kind of creativity and ingenuity Slate Group demonstrates, and our project profiles can help get you there. You can also order samples to see Accent in action for yourself.