Wide-format Graphics: Engineering POP displays

by all | 17 February 2015 9:59 am

By Peter Saunders
Point-of-purchase (POP) displays are one of the most commonly produced types of applications today in the digital wide-format printing sector. Both retailers and the third-party products they carry are constantly being refreshed, updated and rebranded, even when marketing budgets are cut, providing a more stable market than exists for many other promotional graphic formats.

Long-term success, however, depends on more than just the ever-increasing speed of on-demand printing. The best-designed POP displays not only showcase brilliant graphics, but are also easy to transport and easy for retail employees to set up on-site without damage.

‘Compliance,’ in retail parlance, is this very issue of ensuring merchandise is safely delivered to—and then properly presented and laid out within—each store in an overall campaign. And compliance is not a small issue; according to Point of Purchase Advertising International (POPAI), a global trade association, more than half of promotional displays never make it onto retail floors!

The resulting market demand has motivated companies like Poptech, based in Richmond Hill, Ont., to innovate in the design and engineering of POP displays that can help retailers better ensure compliance across large chains and small shops alike.

“Our buyers have seen value in significantly increasing their merchandising setup compliance,” says David Minister, president and CEO of Poptech. “The more complex a display’s design, the less likely it is to be set up properly and more likely it is to have something go wrong.

When a box isn’t just a box
Poptech, for its part, was launched 13 years ago by combining expertise in promotional printing and in structural design. At the time, as Minister puts it, the supplier base for corrugated POP displays was dominated 
by longstanding businesses and was tough 
to break into, as many customers—i.e. merchandisers and wholesalers—simply assumed “a box is a box.”

“We needed a major point of difference,” he says. “We began by designing a standee with a pop-up easel back, for which we acquired a patent. It could fold down to one-third the size of a standard display. As it hit the market and we met buyers who needed these standees to also hold actual merchandise, we added stabilizers, trays and shelves, but we continued to design the displays to ship as small as possible. Once we had our first few patents, we were able to open a lot of new doors.”

While many POP display formats have remained steadily popular over the years, the issue of structural design is apparent in how specifically those formats are accomplished. As they are dimensional pieces, there are countless ways to put them together.

Corrugated board is the industry’s primary material of choice, as it is light and can fold flat for inexpensive shipping, yet also support the weight of retail products when standing.

“The space and freight savings are significant,” explains Rob Stahler, a sales executive for Stephen Gould, a retail product packaging manufacturer that has worked with Poptech.

In some cases, designs integrate wood, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) or glass for longer-lasting POP displays.

“Corrugate doesn’t have a long life in retail, usually only up to 90 days, but some requests come out for displays to last all year,” says Minister, “so the idea is to combine the low price of corrugate with the tougher durability of these other materials.”

In other cases, while a corrugated board construction will suffice for the length of the POP campaign, a wax or corrugated plastic base is added to prevent the sponge-like material from absorbing moisture from retail floors, such as that left behind by winter-season shoppers’ boots.

Structural flexibility
Poptech’s range of displays runs the POP gamut, from countertop brochure holders to stacked shelves to multi-angle dimensional displays and life-size standees. As the company has grown, it has outsourced much of its fabrication work. It still sources its own paper and corrugated board, but leaves the printing, die-cutting, mounting and lamination to other companies, before bringing projects back in-house for assembly, packing and shipping.

“We’re stronger as a middleman than as a manufacturer,” says Minister. “We can turn out products much quicker, since we can just work with more companies as needed. And the printing technique is determined by volume. If our customers need 100 to 150 pieces, they’re directly printed on a digital press. Anything above and beyond that goes to litho.”

Even after displays come back to Poptech from its printers, the company does not deliver them directly to the end customers, 
i.e. the retailers. Rather, it ships in bulk to the merchandisers and wholesalers. And its capacity to do so has grown through licensing on an international scale.

“Our strength is really in structural design,” Minister explains, “so we license our technology to other companies with their own solid client lists and a background in distribution to handle the actual sales. This approach has helped us grow fast. We now have 12 patents, which can encompass a wide range of displays, and we really focus on servicing our licensees.”

With files from Poptech. For more information, visit www.poptech.ca.

Source URL: https://www.signmedia.ca/wide-format-graphics-engineering-pop-displays/

---