Technology Case Studies - Exporting

Typography

Type foundry - 30 employees - £2.5m turnover

The Challenge

This Company pioneered the use of CD-ROMs in selling electronic typefaces to printers and designers. Typefaces are supplied on electronically locked CDs and customers pay by credit care for an electronic key to unlock the typefaces they want. This Company had strong markets overseas, but producing multilingual manuals - needed to tell customers how to find, download, install and pay for the fonts - was many times the cost of the CD-ROM which contained the fonts.

The Answer

The answer was to include manuals as electronic documents on the CD-ROM itself, and redesign the CD-ROM software to be an interactive brochure rather than just a database of products. Eliminating paper manuals meant making the CD-ROM software much easier to use and consistent on different types of computer. This needed investment, but the opportunity was taken to make it easier to add new languages in the future.

The Benefits

The cost of printing manuals was eliminated. Distribution costs (postage and packing) were slashed, and the cost reductions allowed them to send new CDs regularly to existing customers at no charge. This helps protect and expand sales.