West Marine

Overview

Before I arrived, West Marine’s 25-person creative team was sending every page of their monthly mailers and 600+ page annual catalog to an outside agency, waiting days for printed proofs, marking them up, and FedExing them back. It was slow, expensive, and out of their hands. I was hired to bring prepress in-house and save the company millions in agency fees.

Every page started coming through me before it went to press. I’d read it the way an editor reads a manuscript, except for the things that only show up in print: type consistency, kerning, widows and orphans, rich blacks, neutral grays, four-color builds on small type, image resolution and distortion, overset text. Then each page went out to PDF/X and through a custom Enfocus PitStop Pro preflight profile I built to catch whatever my eyes had missed. Stakeholder proofing rounds that used to take a week now took a few hours, and when everything was signed off I uploaded the final files through the printer’s portal.

Three or four times a year I flew to the Midwest to press check the catalog, standing on the pressroom floor with the operators as the first sheets came off. Those trips built the kind of relationships with printers and paper and print brokers where a phone call solved a problem before it became one. Seven years in, the team had a proofing system they could trust, real control over how their work looked in print, and millions of dollars that stayed in the building.