I’ve heard many complaints regarding CAFTA, and most of them boil down to the same issue: foreign corporations are bigger, and they’ll swallow our poor competitors whole. People with this argument often use words indicating size, implying that by girth alone these behemoths will squash our tiny industry.
What most of these people actually mean, and what they never tell you, is that they’re afraid that these companies are just plain better. It’s not their magnitude that scares competitors here, but the fact that having actual competition would require them to get off their bloody asses and produce something that’s up to international standards.
Allow me to tell you a story.
I just started consulting again full time, and created a company with a team of close friends called Arquetipos. We have the vision that you either do things right or don’t do them at all, and that these should extend to every aspect of the company, specially those areas that involve communication with clients. As part of the process of building up the company’s identity, Rodolfo Dengo designed a gorgeous business card, and we set to finding a local printer to produce them. We had some optional items we could have lived without, such as infrared coating on only some sections of the card, but we were sure we could find someone to print them out locally without much fuss.
We went to three different local printers and asked them to get us some printing tests, something to convince us to go with them. We were expecting these would be their best work, geared towards winning us as clients.
We were wrong.
Each and everyone had serious problems: the text looked jagged, the colors had bled, the solid blue had streaks. At one place some cards had a brown gunk on them I’d rather not inquire about. Not a single one was even up to the level of the tests I printed with my $50 Pixma, much less being anywhere close to acceptable.
On our fourth attempt we found a provider who swore they could do everything we wanted, on professional quality. We requested a quote. It took them almost two week to get it to us, and they demanded we printed at least 2,000 cards, without them printing a sample first, and with no re-print if the results were sub-par.
At this point, had I found the right double-sided card stock, I would have done them in-house myself.
In the end we decided to try Overnight Prints, an online printing site. Rodolfo was unsure and asked if we should risk it. Why not? - I replied - We already know results here are going to be crap. We sent them our specs, including the Spot UV coating on the logo. They gave us a quote, way below anything we had found here. Their minimum lot requirements were lower as well. We paid via credit card, and waited.
Two days later the cards shipped. For days after that they were in Costa Rica. We opened the box, hoping for the best.
The cards were everything we expected, just like they had plucked them from Rodolfo’s mind - printed and delivered here faster than it took some companies to give us a quote, and at under 80% of the cheapest local cost.
We needn’t sign onto CAFTA for local printers to have a problem - they have already lost.