Poor print quality despite decent customer service.
TL;DR summary: Our prints looked bad. Customer service was great, and they printed a new batch. The replacement batch was passable but not amazing. We don’t plan to use SPS again.
We’d been using a different print company for the last several years, and while we had never had any issues, I wasn’t seeing anything I was really digging in their templates this year, and I also don’t love that they print their logo on every card. We decided to give Social Print Studio a throw because I’d heard good things, and I’m always happy to support California-based businesses. It wasn’t a decision we took lightly though, as the aforementioned competitor offers envelope printing services, and they already had a version of our address list from the previous year — getting that out and setting things up to print envelopes myself was a bit of an undertaking, but I was really stoked on the possibility of SPS being awesome, and it was additional work I was willing to take on.
The design process with SPS was fine, though I do wish that there had been clearer print-safe / crop indicators so I could have dialed that in more precisely in the digital proofing phase. It worked well enough, though, and after a few iterations, we got things aligned and placed exactly as we wanted.
Ordering was straightforward — no issues or concerns with checkout — and communication was good after the order was placed, letting me know when things were underway and when our cards shipped.
I was excited when the cards arrived, and I opened them immediately. Unfortunately, my initial response was ‘oh… these are kind of meh’ — I felt as though the primary image looked muddy and had a lot less pop than I was expecting. It was a black and white image, and it looked as though a lot of things had been crushed tonally. When I flipped the card over though, I was shocked: The images looked similarly ‘meh’, but the type looked absolutely terrible. Upon closer inspection, the cause of all the issues was the registration — basically, it looked as though they were made on a 00s era BubbleJet with a print head that was out of alignment.
I reached out to customer service, and they responded very quickly despite the fact that I reached out at the end of business hours during a busy time of year. They understood the issue, and shared images of my cards with the print team. The next day, I was informed that they agreed that the cards weren’t up to snuff and reprinted them. They were quickly dispatched, and I received a replacement set later that week.
Unfortunately, the replacement set still had registration issues. While they looked better, I was still disappointed, but I didn’t bother to raise the issue again because I didn’t have time to repeat the process another time and still get the cards out to folks by our self-imposed deadline.
The second round is fine, but they’re just fine. They’re still slightly out of registration, and oddly, they printed a bit darker than the first round, so while our images are less muddy, and the type is definitely easier to read, the shadow detail in the images is no longer present.
I don’t think we’ll use Social Print Studio again based on this experience, but I totally understand that I my standards for print quality are extremely high. If you fall into the same boat, you may want to consider looking elsewhere.