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In this era of print managers and superplants, one print buyer has mapped out a path, away from the giants' economies of scale. "I prefer working with family-run independent printers; you get better service from smaller companies," says Lisa Kendall, senior print buyer with charity Help the Aged. "They respond better if something goes wrong. You feel like you get swallowed up by the big companies."

With a team of two others, Kendall is responsible for all of Help the Aged’s print, procuring everything from 10m-run door drops to promotional t-shirts and umbrellas. She is also in charge of the livery for the company vans, and signage and point-of-sale displays for the charity’s 365 shops across the UK.

“I have to source all sorts of things to go into the mailing packs we send out, from ribbons in the brand colour to tea bags for a campaign about hydration,” says Kendall. One fitting example of the role’s challenges was for the procurement of an ophthalmic pack. The mailer needed to include a piece of plastic that, when you looked through it, mimicked the vision of someone with cataracts. “The plastic needed to give the right effect and still be the right size and shape, and not be too heavy, to go into the packs. It had to be cloudy, but not too much or too little,” she explains. Everything is printed in the UK, partly due to pressure for short turnarounds. “My team is usually the last to know when something’s happening. Things land on our desk and we have to get it done – and fast,” says Kendall.

She is wary of chopping and changing printers, having stuck with her pool of suppliers for years. “The printers we use know what we want. We can leave them to get on with it and for most jobs we don’t need to press pass ourselves.”

With such a broad range of printed collateral, Kendall must stay abreast of virtually every technique. “We keep being told that digital print is the way forward for mail-outs, but we don’t use a lot of digital.” The charity’s long run-lengths don’t warrant digital, nor does she put out highly targeted products. The extra cost of digital would also need to be justified by a better response rate.

Nor does Kendall blindly buy into the electronic revolution, despite the advice of internet advocates. “A lot of people are pushing for email campaigns and text messaging, but I don’t think that’s right for the people we appeal to.” Help the Aged’s support base is, unsurprisingly, slightly older.Kendall says the challenge is to come up with new ideas and ways of attracting support but not to use new technologies just because they are available.

Kendall takes the same pragmatism to the environmental debate. “It comes down to cost. We would have to look at whether switching to FSC or PEFC paper would attract more donors and what the cost implications would be.” She adds that a review is underway.

Kendall has spent much of her working life in the print industry, having worked as an estimator for several commercial sheetfed printers, as well as a stint at a repro house. “I didn’t mean to get into print. I left college and took the first job that came along,” she says.

After a couple of redundancies, she decided to step back and reassess the situation. Along came a job advertisement for a print buyer at Help the Aged. “Having dealt with print buyers before, I knew what the job involved and thought I’d be good at it.” Six years on, she says she’s really happy and not ready to move on. No doubt her loyal stable of smaller suppliers would pledge their support.