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Posted on by Regan Dickinson Posted in Case Studies & Profiles
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Transitions to Success: Red River Photo Services

Inkjet printer matte canvasLeighton and Katrina Kirkpatrick, owners of Red River Photo Services in Oklahoma City, have created a business that emphasizes the experience. What Red River Photo means by that is how the customer is drawn in and made a part of the entire printing experience from the beginning.

“This is an open place; there’s no front counter where customers have to talk to someone in the front about what they need, where it then gets passed to someone in the back who passes it to someone else in the back who tries to interpret what three other people said about the project,” explains Leighton Kirkpatrick. “That’s been a big part of our success and one of the reasons we grew last year… Personal involvement and letting them be part of the experience. We bring them right into the shop right where we’re working and sit down at the computer with them to go through their project. We combine a place that’s enjoyable to visit – where they will be treated in a friendly and helpful fashion – with a final product that exceeds their expectations.”

This is not idle “customer service” talk. It’s based on more than 35 years of experience in imaging, first in film and now in digital output. Red River Photo Services has been based in Oklahoma City for more than eight years. Previously, Leighton had a successful lab in New York City for more than 18 years, catering to modeling agencies, advertising firms and other high-end clientele.

Inkjet printing canvas
Red River Photo's showroom features the work of some of Oklahoma's most prominent artists printed on LexJet Sunset Select Matte Canvas.

Katrina is originally from Oklahoma City, so the pair decided to settle down there, bringing some of the New York-based business with them. “We were doing work for agencies all over, so for many of them it didn’t really matter where we were located,” says Leighton. “I’m glad we had that business because it took us a couple of years to get established locally.”

And get established they did. Shortly after making the move, Red River Photo began making the transition from a chemical lab to fully digital. As Leighton explains, it wasn’t an easy transition, particularly for someone who had been so immersed in all the ins, outs, nuances and details of the chemical process.

“I love it now. It’s irreplaceable and we’ve become very skilled at it. I wouldn’t go back in the darkroom,” says Leighton. “I’ve been doing this for 35 years. Katrina’s been doing it for five to six years and her enthusiasm helps keep me enthusiastic. She’s very good at what she does and she’s as good at printing as I am, which takes a lot of heat off of me. Plus, she is very good with our customers.”

Not only did Red River shift from film to digital, the business itself and the market it serves has evolved, particularly over the past few years. While the company’s specialty is still true-color fine art and photographic reproduction, its growth has been mainly on the commercial side. Red River works with design and architecture firms and corporations to help them full realize the potential of their branding and image.

Inkjet printing on photo paper
Red River Photo printed this 36-in. x 96-in. display for the Oklahoma City Thunder, the city's NBA franchise, on eSatin, laminated and applied to MDF.

“We do just about everything here, and you have to do that as a small business in a relatively small city. We had our best year last year, and it’s been mainly word of mouth and attention to quality that has helped build this business,” says Leighton. “We’re the only art and photo company other than the larger graphics houses that have a 64-inch printer, which has also enabled us to gain more business. We wouldn’t be able to print what we’re doing for the Thunder [Oklahoma City’s NBA franchise] if we didn’t have that machine.”

Red River Photo has an Epson 11800, an Epson 9800 and two Epson 9600s. While the added horsepower and width certainly helps, an important differentiator has been Red River Photo’s willingness to experiment, and experiment successfully, with a lot of different inkjet media.

“I need to know about new products, and my reps at LexJet tell me what’s coming out and what’s being changed or discontinued across the industry, so I’m always in the know. It also helps with sales because it enables me to go to my clients and let them know about those new products and what they can do for them,” says Leighton. “Product delivery from LexJet has been perfect as well. They tell me when it’s going to get here, and it gets here, and if it doesn’t, they fix it.”

Leighton says his favorite products, which are also customer favorites, include Water-Resistant Satin Cloth for both backlit and frontlit applications, Polyvoile for large, lightweight banners, Sunset Photo eSatin for all kinds of applications, Premium Archival Matte for non-reflecting poster work and Sunset Select Matte Canvas.

Inkjet printing photo paper
Photo by Shellee Graham printed by Red River Photo on the always-reliable Sunset eSatin Photo Paper with an Epson 11880.

“We’ve been applying graphics to a lot of different substrates. We recently produced about 55 prints mounted on Aluma-Panel for Chesapeake Energy. We used eSatin and applied a luster laminate over the prints. I love the eSatin. We use it more than anything else, because it has very good color saturation and when you put it in the machine you know what you’re going to get,” says Leighton.

Leighton expects to continue growing in this direction in the future, blending Red River Photo’s color and image expertise with commercial displays, or what he calls “fine art displays” for commercial clients.

Posted on by Regan Dickinson Posted in Case Studies & Profiles
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Inkjet Quality over Quantity at The Blow Up Lab

The Blow Up Lab is not McDonald’s. After more than 30 years in business, owner Frank McGrath decided early on that he would not offer a pre-packaged commodity for the masses. Instead, he would provide a custom service that would meet the detailed needs of a demanding client base, one that varies from photographers and artists to corporate accounts.

Frank McGrath Blow Up LabWhile the foundation of The Blow Up Lab’s success is individual customer service, McGrath has also made smart moves with technology and finances. He was one of the first traditional photo labs in San Francisco to make the move to inkjet while taking a conservative, pay-as-you-go approach to it.

“We’re solid, we take care of business, we take care of our customers and we’re really good with our suppliers. We never ask for terms and pay our credit cards on time. It proves that you can be fairly small, compete with larger companies and have a profitable niche market,” explains McGrath. “We’re not cheap. Everyone is so price-conscious these days, and to be able to offer a quality product with really good service and turnaround times at a decent price, you have to do old-fashioned things, like stay late if the customer needs you to do that. It’s so corporate now that it’s hard to manufacture that concept into your company mission statement. You can have as many mission statements as you want, but if you have new employees every two months or so, for instance, it doesn’t matter.”

Canon Inkjet Printer at the Blow Up LabThese principles were instrumental in helping The Blow Up Lab come out of the recent recession with a small profit during a time when flat was the new up. “People are always looking for the cash cow; the client they can milk that won’t give them a lot of trouble. We have found that if you can listen to the picky clients, work with them every inch of the way, let them know they’re a valuable client and come through for them, you may not deal with them again, but six months later you get a reference, you’re networked and a whole new avenue opens up,” says McGrath.

Ultimately, McGrath found a service gap and exploited it. “There were a lot of photographers and artists who needed TLC and quality. We were able to create that niche, and now we’re in the black, all the bills are paid and we’re growing,” he says. “Our solution was to become more or less boutique oriented. We’re really good at working with super high quality and understand the concept, but also about speed and making deadlines. We went where most of our competitors couldn’t believe where we were going, which was working with artists and picky professionals.”

Chemical to Inkjet
The third leg of The Blow Up Lab’s stool – technology – began to come to fruition in the early ‘90s with the advent of viable inkjet printers for photo reproductions and graphics. McGrath worked closely with the two forerunners of the time – Encad and HP – and brought inkjet in-house. The switch was relatively sudden since McGrath was certain inkjet was the future. McGrath says the total transition took about ten years. Then around 2000 everything went inkjet at The Blowup Lab.

“Inkjet technology was in its infant stages in the ‘90s, but look how far it has come. The prints I’m doing now will last substantially longer than the traditional chemical based photo printing we were doing. In the old days, if your processor went down you were in a lot of trouble,” says McGrath. “Early on I decided to follow the money; manufacturers were pouring a lot of capital into the technology so I knew that if we stuck with inkjet it would be a winner. In hindsight it seems totally bloody obvious, but at the time it seemed like a radical departure and people were surprised we did it. We were able to lower our labor costs and the productivity per employee went up substantially. Now we were just putting something on a scanner, scanning it and putting it in Photoshop. We rode that wave in.”

McGrath has been working with Photoshop since its inception and has mastered the fine art of color management to serve those artists and picky professionals that make up the bulk of his clients. The key is in the interface between software and hardware; The Blow Up Lab creates custom profiles for almost every project, ensuring a color workflow that is both consistent and designed for the client.

The Blow Up Lab’s printer stable now includes a 64-inch wide Epson Stylus Pro 11880, a 72-inch Roland low-solvent, two Canon iPF8100s and an Epson 4900. McGrath estimates that the split between fine art and fine photo and commercial work is about 50/50.

“We do a lot of canvas and vinyl printing and our work often blends classic fine art reproduction with projects that are more institutional, such as some huge murals we printed for Pixar and museum projects” McGrath says.