Print Works! Print Works! Fall 2015 | Page 37

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 38 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! 37