Gdyńskie Centrum Sportu: a city sports calendar turned into a production schedule

01 Context and challenge

Gdyńskie Centrum Sportu is a municipal body that organises and runs sports events all year round: road races, triathlons, regattas and events for local residents. Each of them needs different branding. A run requires course, start and finish signage. A triathlon has several transition zones, and a regatta has to be visible from the shore and from the water. Then there are posters and leaflets that need to reach the city well in advance.

A public body buys print through tenders and call-off contracts. The supplier therefore does not get one large project. Throughout the contract it has to deliver successive, often small and urgent orders, in different techniques and on the basis of a scope described in advance. The challenge is that such orders are regular and at the same time hard to predict.

02 Our role and solution

According to our management, for more than 10 years we have been winning tenders to supply Gdyńskie Centrum Sportu. During this time we produced materials for events organised or run by this body.

What we did:
- posters, leaflets and other information print in offset and digital technology, including leaflets and folded brochures,
- large-format print: banners, vinyl and boards,
- mesh banners for larger display areas,
- flags and feather flags for start, finish and fan zones,
- signage and display elements for events.

We served runs, including races held under the PKO name. We printed materials for them on behalf of the organisers, not the bank. We also produced branding for triathlons, including IRONMAN, as well as regattas and other city events.

What we did not do: we were not the supplier to all of the City of Gdynia's bodies, nor a supplier to the title sponsors of these events. We did not organise the events.

We describe the two largest Gdynia projects separately: the branding of UEFA EURO U21 2017 in Gdynia and Volvo Gdynia Sailing Days.

03 How we worked

Synchronisation is the most important thing in this cooperation. At times we are preparing posters for an event planned well ahead while also printing banners and flags for an event taking place the coming weekend. We split orders from one calendar between offset, digital and large-format machines so that they do not block each other.

With call-off orders, repeatability pays off. Formats, materials and finishing methods that worked well for one edition of a run stay in the production documentation. For the next edition we change the graphics, but we do not have to work out the banner construction, the type of mesh or the flag fixing method from scratch.

Gdynia is at the opposite end of the country from our plant in Wieluń. We choose the shipping channel to suit the order: smaller batches go by courier, while larger sets for a specific date travel with our own or dedicated transport.

04 Results

The most important result is the continuity of the cooperation. Through successive tender procedures we have continued to serve a body that organises many different sports events every year. Each of these events received its own set of printed materials, from a poster in the city to a banner at the finish line. According to our management, over the years of cooperation we have produced thousands of square metres of print.

05 What set us apart

In a long-term relationship with a public body, a single eye-catching project is not what counts. What counts is that each subsequent order under the contract goes through production with the same care as the first. We have offset, digital and large-format printing in one plant, including UV printing up to 3.2 m wide and textile printing. This means we deliver the entire scope described in the order in-house, without splitting it between several subcontractors. Since 1991 we have worked on a model where orders, from a poster to a mesh banner, go to one team.