quality and craftsmanship that goes into a
refined product.
To answer your question, then, print
is not dead. Rather, it has also become a
luxury good.
Print couture
If you’re a company which, for example,
devotes 18 hours of labour to the con-
struction of a single handbag, you are say-
ing something about your brand: You’re
unhurried, you value quality above all, you
provide a product that most others are
unwilling or unable to produce.
When developing a branding tool, you
will look for a medium that reflects those
values. That’s where print comes in. Our
answer to the niche art of old-school hand
stitching is an adherence to the niche art
of old-school journalism.
In my division, Spafax Luxury Brands,
we create custom-published travel and
lifestyle magazines for clients such as
Targeting the world's wealthiest and most
influential people – from Hollywood producers
to today’s top CEOs – Bombardier Business
Aircraft's Experience is a lifestyle magazine
that speaks directly to this elite international
clientele. The large-format publication offers
its exclusive readership the best in travel, luxury
and aircraft innovation.
c o n t i n u e d o n pag e
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Mercedes-Benz, Bombardier Business
Aircraft and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts.
Even after our stories are assigned
and edited, we still invest in fact checkers
to verify our sources.
That means, if we say “a blue mist rose
over the mountains in the morning,” our
fact checker gets on the phone to a local
meteorologist to determine whether the
refraction of light in combination with that
specific time of day would cause A) mist
and B) a blue-ish hue.
We still employ a copy editor to go
over each piece of text with a fine-toothed
comb, to systematically (some might say
anally) root out obscure grammatical inac-
curacies and ensure consistency with our
extensive editorial style guide.
We still invest in proofreaders to lend
fresh eyes to the pages before they go to
press. Our art director spends the night
at the printer once an issue to watch the
pages coming off the machine and cor-
rect for any color discrepancies.
These once-standard practices have
become increasingly rare. Many publica-
tions have simply stopped putting content
print works!
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