Stop Letting Cheap Overseas Competitors Dictate Your Margins

If you are a print, packaging, or agency leader still fighting bidding wars, you are playing a losing game.

During my presentation at the FSEA Digital Embellishment Conference in Nashville, I laid out exactly how bigDAWGS escaped the dreaded race to the bottom.

The Race to the Bottom

Here is the hard truth about competing on physical products:

• The Early Advantage: In 2013, bigDAWGS was one of only two companies in North America manufacturing video brochures and screens.

• The Overseas Flood: By 2015, over 100 overseas competitors in China flooded the market with cheaper alternatives.

• The Price Trap: You can scream “quality” and “service” all you want, but when identical products flood the market, those claims become moot. Buyers start ignoring the pitch, and everyone is strictly competing on price.

We needed a way out to protect our high-value clients—like the NFL, who use our video screens in their annual draft folders. Our solution? Digital embellishments.

Changing the Conversation with Digital Embellishments

When Konica Minolta first approached me about the opportunity in print embellishments, I was hesitant. At the time, our core business was technology, with print only accounting for about 10% of our operations.

But we saw an opportunity to transform our standard flat, soft-touch video folders. By adding digital embellishments—specifically raised UV, raised varnish, and raised foil—we completely changed the conversation. We added physical texture and premium visual appeal to our products, instantly separating us from the cheap overseas alternatives.

We stopped the bleeding. We kept our customers, avoided bidding wars, and stopped competing purely on price.

The Real ROI of Perceived Value

The most powerful realization wasn’t just customer retention; it was the massive impact on our profitability. Value is always perceived before it is experienced, and giving clients something they can physically feel changes what they are willing to pay.

• The Investment: Adding embellishments increased our production costs by just 5%.

• The Return: That premium texture allowed us to charge 30% more for the exact same core product.

Do the math. We stopped fighting for pennies, kept our high-value clients, and massively increased our profit margins.

Watch the full breakdown from the FSEA conference in the video

DISCLAIMER: All brand names, logos, and trademarks appearing in this video are the property of their respective owners and are used solely for illustrative and demonstration purposes. No affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement is implied.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT (AI-GENERATED):

0:00 “So how did we get into now, digital embellishments? By digital, I mean specifically in this case, raised UV, raised varnish, and raised foil.”
0:10 “Now, when I was dealing with Konica Minolta up in Canada, they kept saying, ‘Hey, do you know how much opportunity you can make selling print embellishments?'”
0:20 “But I wasn’t really interested in selling print. I mean, most of my business at the point in time was more of a tech business. Right? I mean, print only accounted for about 10%.”
0:32 “But, this product here, uh, I don’t think—I don’t know if you guys saw it, but I’ll pull it out.”
0:40 “Video screens is another thing that we do. This is for the NFL. We put video screens in their sales folders for the NFL Draft every year.”
0:50 “But this product… I mean, I don’t know how many of you’ve seen it, but in 2013, bigDAWGS was one of the two companies that offered and sold this and manufactured this in, uh, North America.”
1:05 “The other one was Americhip in California. bigDAWGS in Canada.”
1:09 “By 2015, there were over 100 companies in China selling this type of product.”
1:20 “Now, I don’t know if you guys have ever competed with anything from China, but it’s always about price. You’re always competing about price.”
1:31 “You can scream quality and service all you want, but everybody says that, it’s just moot. People are just ignoring it.”
1:38 “So, yeah… from an end customer point—an end customer use… I mean, this is pretty much for the end customer in this case for digital embellishments because it was all internal.”
1:49 “We needed a way to stop competing on price. And how did we do that? We saw this as an opportunity.”
1:56 “So, before we had this just flat. Flat. And it was nice, soft touch, had a video screen in it.”
2:02 “But we added embellishments to it. Texture, foil… and then when you open it, video screens.”
2:12 “And yeah, that helped us stop competing on price. We kept more customers. So instead of fighting with bidding wars, we kept more customers. And, you know, we were able to stop kind of competing on price.”
2:24 “But you know what? We also realized this. So we were selling this, uh, just flat. And, you know, we were making good coin on it.”
2:34 “But for adding just 5% in embellishments—just 5%—now we’re also able to charge 30% more for the same product.”
2:44 “Do the math. 5% investment, 30% we can charge more.”
2:51 “So that is also the power of embellishments, adding value to it.”