Last year the largest European trade web-to-print company pixartprinting launched an offensive in the UK by partnering with Precision Printing in Essex. So what’s in it for UK trade printers and why should they be impressed?
If you’re a printer – wide-format or commercial, digital or litho, large or even small family owned, in fact if you’re a printing professional of any variety, then you should be mightily interested in pixartprinting.
It is the largest trade web-to-print company in Europe for professional customers. Indeed a recent survey carried out by the company revealed that printing companies regularly using pixartprinting as their production engine grew as much as 30% per annum. Got your attention?
Founded in 1994 as a traditional printing business by CEO Matteo Rigamonti, the company pioneered a move into web-to-print in 2000. Over the years, it has garnered an undisputed leadership position in Italy and last year it was recognised in the La Vedovella awards, Italy’s most important and prestigious graphic arts accolades. Latest figures for the company show extraordinary growth of around 50%.
Since it moved into web-to-print work pixartprinting has always looked beyond Italy for customers, and at the start of last year, thanks to a new HQ and seriously impressive production facility in Quarto D’Altino on the outskirts of Venice, pixartprinting developed a new determined strategy to conquer Europe and beyond.
As a purely web-to-print company, everything is done online. Customers simply select the products they are interested in, follow a guided procedure to receive an estimate that is completely free, and then place their orders by submitting the file to print.
Printing is carried out centrally at the company’s 20.000m2 production site. Print prices are extremely competitive, and obviously the longer the delivery times, (the longest being seven days) the lower the price.
Each day, nearly 7,000 estimates are recorded on the site, roughly 2,000 of which translate into actual orders and the same number of daily shipments throughout Europe, with a total portfolio of approximately 65,000 customers. The company, which employs almost 150 staff, works three shifts to ensure a seven-day service, consumes nearly 200 tonnes of paper per month for small-sized jobs and roughly 60,000m2 of rigid material for large-sized jobs.
While pixartprinting prides itself on the user-friendliness, quality, speed and reliability of its on-line print ordering service fueled by its user-friendly customized software, it also recognises that some customers need the human touch to make the on-line experience successful.
To this end, the company is implementing a continual roll out of Virtual Shops – local domains that have been customised in the local language with a domestic customer service number to a native speaker who can assist them with any queries.
So far, Virtual Shops have been set up in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal but domains have been acquired for a further 20 European and ten non-European countries.
While pixartprinting has employed a uniform business model in the establishment of its web-to-print service in mainland Europe, its strategy in dealing with the UK has been different.
Last November pixartprinting went into partnership with Gary Peeling CEO of Precision Printing in Essex to create a new company named pixartprinting.co.uk.
Unlike the rest of Europe small-format printing is carried out in the UK while wide-format work is carried out in Italy, although it is likely that the more popular, flexible wide-format work will be re-routed to Essex later this year, with rigid flatbed capacity following in 2012.
Matteo Rigamonti, CEO pixartprintng says: “We initially started with great enthusiasm in the UK but the feedback we received was not what we expected. We saw that the reason for this was an issue of trust, English customers just didn’t trust an Italian company, this is why we decided to go into partnership with a UK company, bringing us closer to UK customers.”
This approach seems to be paying off. In the last six months, the UK usage has doubled and continues to grow.
The message for UK printers is a compelling one: the ability to use pixartprinting.co.uk as a production partner to offer any type of printing in your portfolio.
If you’re a commercial printer for example, by using pixartprinting.co.uk as and when required, you now have the ability to add wide-format roll-to-roll or direct to substrate printing to your portfolio. If you’re a wide-format printer but you don’t have a flatbed or latest latex technology in-house, you can offer a number of products based on these technologies to your competitive arsenal.
If you’re a large printer and you need help with overflow, you’re covered. If you’re a small company that can’t afford the capital for a new machine, can’t afford a risk but you want to continue to grow by moving into new market areas, pixartprinting.co.uk would be a good starting point. If you’re a wide-format printer, you can now start to cover all the small-format print requirements for your customer.
Whatever your printing context you can utilise the production capacity of pixartprinting to service your existing clients to a far greater degree, or entice new clients with new products you hadn’t been able to offer before.
Northprint in Harrogate back in May this year was a key marker as to how the Great British Printer would react to pixartprinting’s entry into the UK. The reaction was very positive with 300 leads at the stand being converted into 100 new customers.
Says Gary Peeling: “There was a great deal of interest in our trade printing services from all the visitors to our stand, many of which saw the considerable benefits of using pixartprinting.co.uk as an outsourced trade printer for certain print jobs, rather than having to invest in capital equipment every time a new market opportunity presents itself.
“Our extensive range of trade printing services – from long-run litho to short-run on-demand digital, banner production to textile printing, labels and packaging printing – ensures just about every printer can potentially utilise our trade printing services. We believe using pixartprinting as production partner is a risk-free way for printers to enter new markets and gain great traction with customers by providing additional, added value services to their current offering.”
The partnership in the UK is a pilot project for pixartprinting. The results obtained from this will be the litmus paper for the business model moving forward and may be replicated with commercial and production partnerships in other European countries.
Concludes Rigamonti: “We will continue to invest in the UK market and believe that in time we will start to see the same success we are getting with other European countries.”