It Started With a Bingo Night (and a Panicked Voicemail)
It was a Thursday afternoon in early September 2024. My phone buzzed with a voicemail from our VP of Operations. Her voice had that clipped, polite tone that meant trouble.
"I need 200 bingo cards by next Tuesday. Themed. And not the boring kind. Can you handle it?"
This was the moment I realized our company had a printing problem. Not a printer problem—we had a perfectly good office copier. But a printing-as-a-service problem. We were ordering Hallmark sympathy cards from local shops, printing flyers on that office copier (which always jammed), and custom Bingo cards from an online vendor who couldn't invoice properly.
Total chaos.
The Old Way: Three Vendors and a Headache
When I took over purchasing in 2020, my approach was... pragmatic. If a department needed something, I found a vendor. Simple. By 2023, I was managing eight different suppliers for various print needs: one for boxed Christmas cards, another for printable greeting cards, a third for business brochures, a fourth for envelopes (ugh), and yes, a separate one just for themed Bingo cards.
"The vendor who couldn't provide proper invoicing cost us $2,400 in rejected expenses." — personal experience, March 2022.
I don't have hard data on how many hours I spent chasing vendors across those years (note to self: track that metric). But my sense is it was easily 15-20 hours a month. Just on ordering and follow-up. Not including the emotional labor of explaining to a department head why their "how to make an effective flyer" guide wasn't printed on time because the vendor had 'technical difficulties.'
The Hallmark Question Nobody Asked
One of my recurring frustrations was a question I couldn't answer to anyone's satisfaction: "Where are Hallmark greeting cards made?" Our sales team needed this for a client presentation, and I had three different answers from three different sources. (For the record, Hallmark cards are primarily designed in Kansas City, MO, and manufactured across several US facilities plus some overseas partners. But getting that straight from their distributor chain was, well, not easy.)
This was a symptom of a bigger issue: we didn't have a single, reliable source of truth for our print materials. I had a PDF manual for the thermostat—a th6220d1028 manual we found online—but couldn't tell you who made our last batch of brochures.
The Turning Point: A Heartland RV Lesson
In early 2024, our logistics manager asked me to find a specific part number from a "Heartland RV replacement parts catalog PDF." It was an odd request, but it cracked something open in my brain.
Why? Because that catalog was organized. Consistent. Every part had a number, a description, a supplier, and a lead time. It was boring in the best way. I thought: Why can't our office printing be this boring?
Why was I treating each printing need as a unique crisis, when 80% of our orders were the same five product types? Hallmark greeting cards, printable Bingo cards, business flyers, brochures, and envelopes. That was, roughly, 60-80 orders per year. Predictable. Repeatable.
Looking back, I should have standardized suppliers years earlier. At the time, I didn't have the mental bandwidth. I was just responding to fires. If I could redo that decision, I'd invest the three days needed to map out our actual printing demand. But given what I knew then—zero data, just feelings—it made sense to keep the status quo.
How I Fixed It (and What I Learned)
Here's the thing: consolidating vendors was easier than I expected. Painful in the short-term, obviously. But simple in principle.
- Step One: I listed every print order from the previous 12 months. I coded them by product type, quantity, and vendor. (This took three afternoons. Not as fast as I'd hoped, but I had to start somewhere.)
- Step Two: I identified the top three product categories that accounted for 75% of our spending: greeting cards (including sympathy and holiday), promotional flyers, and envelopes/stationery. The remaining 25% was niche stuff—custom Bingo cards for events, bulk boxed Christmas cards for client gifts—that I could handle on a case-by-case basis.
- Step Three: I evaluated our current vendors against a simple rubric: quality, reliability, invoicing ability, and price. (I still kick myself for not doing this formally earlier.)
- Step Four: I moved our core orders—flyers, brochures, and standard cards—to a single online print partner. Someone who could handle a 500-piece run of flyers and a 50-unit order of premium Hallmark cards.
"Total cost of ownership includes the base price, setup fees, shipping, rush fees, and potential reprint costs. The lowest quoted price often isn't the lowest total cost." — my new vendor evaluation guide.
What did I gain? Time. Our ordering process went from an average of 4 touchpoints per order to 2. Our accounting team is happier (consistent invoices). And the VP hasn't panicked-called me in six months. (Thankfully.)
The Effective Flyer Lesson
A practical example: one of my first tests for the new system was a company-wide announcement flyer. The old process would have been: figure out specs, email a local print shop, wait three days for a quote, approve, wait for proof, approve proof, wait for delivery. About 10-14 days total.
With our streamlined partner, I uploaded the file online, selected "standard brochure" template, chose the paper weight, and approved a digital proof within 30 minutes. Delivery in 5 business days.
This worked for us, but our situation was a medium-size business with predictable ordering. If you're a seasonal company with demand spikes—say, a retailer ordering huge runs of Christmas cards in November—the calculus might be different.
The Bingo Card Epilogue
Remember those Bingo cards for the themed night? The vendor I ended up using had a PDF template online: Hallmark Bingo cards printable format. I uploaded our theme, they proofed it in two hours, and a week later, 200 cards arrived at our office. Properly packaged. With a proper invoice.
A year ago, I would have considered this a miracle. Now? It's just how we operate. Not ideal in every way—I'm still wrestling with sustainable packaging options—but workable. And infinitely better than the chaotic mess of eight vendors and no system.
The lesson: Industry evolution isn't just about new technology. It's about accepting that the old way—the ad-hoc, vendor-hopping, crisis-driven way—isn't sustainable. The fundamentals of good procurement haven't changed (know your demand, vet your vendors, track your costs). But the execution? That's evolving. And it's finally giving me time to focus on more important things—like staying ahead of the next panicked voicemail.
(Also, note to self: I really should document that new procurement process for my eventual successor.)
