I am building a new design company with characters and i want to put them on all sorts of stuff. So i am looking for companies to partner with to get these projects done.
Printers employ creative staff to handle layout and design. Any template we use was packaged with the programs. A consumer can buy CDs full of thousands of templates for between $5 and $30. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but trying to license something printers already have three other ways of obtaining is going to be a really tough sell.
For another thing, a printer’s bread and butter is re-orders. Something like a business’s invoice gets designed once, then is repeated with only minor modifications to names or phone numbers for the next ten years — would your model have it that there’s a fee each time the template is run, or just the first time, or pay-per-download, or what? At what point has it been so modified by the printer that the design and layout are theirs?
A model that does work in my industry is the outsourced designer. A lot of itty-bitty printers don’t have anyone in-house to do their design work, and so they either tell the customer to show up with the final design ready to run, or they farm out the entire job elsewhere. Someone I could call or email and have a proof back that day or next would be (and is) very helpful. Most of the independent designers are all Quark- and Flash-addicted and ask ridiculous rates for completely over-doing a simple two-color business card, or they’re only interested in doing massive print campaigns, and the result is thousands of small business owners having to design their own stuff in MS Word.
As a printer, if you came to me three years ago and said I could get the same, reliable, on-demand type and design only when I needed it instead of having to pay someone to sit there even with no work to do, I would be all over that.
The second arm is to approach non-printing businesses (spas, builders, whatever) and be THEIR designer as well — then you can broker the print work and handle all of that for them, including the invoicing. Printers sell to you for a trade price, you mark it up 30%, and sell it to your clients.