printing.com partner prospectus
- 1. P A R T N E R P R O S P E C T U S we are you
- 2. HELLO
- 3. 3 Our industry has had a tough old ride over recent years. It’s not been business as usual for quite some time. We started printing.com nearly 20 years ago. I opened the very first store in Edinburgh back in 1998. Lots of things have changed since then, but lots have stayed the same. Clients still want high quality. They want value-for-money. They want things quickly – much quicker than they used to. And they want personal service. You might have considered partnering with printing.com in the past and decided it wasn’t for you. That’s ok. But maybe it’s time for a second look? For the first time, printing.com is available as a simple software subscription and brand licence. We’ve made things simpler and we’ve made them better. What’s more, we’ve substantially reduced pricing on our core range, making us more competitive than ever. That’s why we’re adding new partners like you every month. Business can be a lonely place. Sometimes it’s better to be part of something bigger. When times are tough, it’s good to be able to share your thoughts with others facing the same issues. It’s comforting to know we’re all in the same boat. It’s good to know you’re following best practice or learning where others are doing things a little differently. We also know it’s difficult keeping up with the latest technology. Clients are so demanding these days. We’ve built our business by making it easier for clients to do business with our partners, than their rivals. We’ve never stopped improving our processes and eliminating admin time is at the heart of our efficient systems. We’re not asking you to give up your independence – you’re an entrepreneur. We’re asking whether becoming a local printing.com partner could be the best investment you’ve made. Becoming our exclusive partner in your town. Being us, where you are. The power of the printing.com brand and marketing support behind you. Take a few minutes to look through this prospectus. Then we’d be happy to speak on the phone or call into your premises to talk things through and demo our box of magic tricks. We are you. Is it time you joined us? Peter Gunning CEO, printing.com
- 5. 5 WE HELP YOU SELL MORE PRINTING Our partners tell us they spend all their time working on promotions and campaigns for clients. They know they need to promote themselves, but it’s difficult to find the time. That’s why we’ve developed a huge suite of marketing collateral, designed to help you sell. From Look Books to expo stands. Brochures to eshots. Samples and mailers. Point of sale and display. It’s all there. We know that it takes a cumulative approach to win the sale. Repetition and consistency is the key. That’s why we centrally create tools for you to download and personalise, or benefit from our bulk production. Pick and choose what you’d like or follow our model marketing plan. It all has one purpose: To inspire clients and back up your sales process.
- 7. 7 Running a small business takes effort. As a business owner, your time gets zapped dealing with loads of weird stuff you just didn’t plan for. We understand. That’s why we share some of the strain. Each month we can automatically send email campaigns to your clients, on your behalf. These are backed up by automated “time to reorder?” personalised emails, complete with thumbnails of the client’s graphic file. One click and it’s in their basket. Sign up to our central monthly mailing and we’ll send printed mailers or postcards to your list… for less than the price of a second class stamp. Of course this doesn’t mean you can stick your feet up and wait for the money to roll in. The best performing partners back up this automated activity with networking, personal calls and social selling. WE AUTOMATE YOUR MARKETING
- 9. 9 The graphics business of today needs to do more than just business cards. You’ve got to get your full share of a client’s marketing wallet or purse. These days, a client allocates their marketing budget across a range of different mediums. If you’re not getting them all, you’re introducing a client to someone else who will probably try to. As a partner, you’re seamlessly hooked into the famous printing.com production hub. There are millions of print products and prices pre- calculated, all with a guaranteed service level. But you know this already. On top of that, we’ve invested heavily in direct-to-fabric printing. That means we can help you enter the fast growing digital textiles market. Start selling low-cost expo displays, enormous meeting booths, feather flags, acoustic furniture and point-of-sale. WE HELP YOU TO DIVERSIFY
- 11. 11 If you don’t do web, your relationship with the client is at risk. That’s the inconvenient truth. Clients are increasingly prioritising their website spend ahead of print. Win the web, and print comes with it. Allow your client to go somewhere else for their website, and they may not come back. If you’ve tried designing websites before and found it a faff, maybe we can help. As a partner, you get access to Brambl, a drag ‘n’ drop website design tool. If you can Photoshop, now you can web. Build sites free of charge using Brambl. When the client is ready to go live with their site, you charge them and pay a deployment fee. Brambl isn’t just for brochure sites – it handles ecommerce effortlessly and is brilliant with booking systems. Try it out at brambl.com. WE HELP YOU DO MORE WEB
- 13. 13 Everyone is pushed for time. We’re all up against deadlines. We don’t all work office hours and many of us have more than one job. That’s why we think it’s important to be flexible. That means working the way our clients want to work. We often hear a printer saying how proud they are of the personal service they deliver. And rightly so, but to keep clients it’s about more than that. Clients want personal service but they also want convenience and efficiency. Give clients the online tools they want. Whether that’s editing an online template or uploading a print ready file. Automatically checking their artwork doesn’t fall into the quiet zone. Approving a proof or sharing their files and images. Letting them pay online, with their saved card. Or checking their order history and making reorders. Build client portals in minutes, beautifully styled in their brand. We think that helps turn good clients into great clients who’ll stick with you. WE MAKE YOUR CLIENTS STICKIER
- 14. OUR W3P SYSTEM AUTOMATES THE CLIENT ORDER CYCLE… Client orders online You’re notified when they add to basket Pays online Funds go into your bank account directly Uploads or edits template PDF file transferred directly to client’s job Automatic file check File is preflighted by PitStop & Callas Bad files repaired Known issues fixed or notified of fatal errors
- 15. 15 One word that’s guaranteed to send you to sleep is ‘workflow’. But businesses spend a fortune on software to optimise their processes. As a partner, you get w3p included. We don’t call it workflow (boring, obvs). But that’s what it is – it’s a total cloud-based software system, built entirely to help you run your studio. It’s designed to handle hundreds of jobs in progress at the same time, all at different parts of the lifecycle. It helps you keep track. Use it to allocate work to team members and monitor the performance of your business. It’s the ‘back office’ which works seamlessly with the printing.com website and client portals. w3p is used by over 1,000 studios around the world. You’ll wonder how you lived without it. Read more about what it does at w3p.com. WE MAKE YOU MORE EFFICIENT Invoice generated Emailed invoice and copy pushed into your Xero File check shared Clients sent link to view results and approve online Client approves or rejects Check quiet zone and approve or upload new file Sent to print After approval, automatically begins production Job status updated Client views progress and receives email updates
- 17. 17 WE HELP YOU SELL OTHER STUFF As a printing.com partner, you’ll use our marketing collateral to help you sell. That covers our litho and digitally printed range, manufactured at our centralised production hub. Then there’s our extensive range of ink-on- fabric and large format displays. On top of that, you’ll be connected to our network partners – they make weird and wonderful promo goods like pens, branded water bottles and embroidered shirts. Maybe you make some things yourself in house. Or maybe you’ve found a niche product you outsource and resell. That’s totally fine. We make it easy to create your own products, set your own pricing and manage them in the same workflow. These are only visible to your clients, but they’re mixed in amongst the rest of the printing.com range in a logical way. Clients place orders the same way. That could be a combination of products made in our hub, by our network partners, or you in your studio. They all go in the same basket and are routed to the right factory intelligently. You just pay a small fee for jobs where you’re using w3p to manage production, or outsourcing to your suppliers. The best bit is, even if you’re making it yourself, clients get the same joined- up experience. They can easily order, pay, proof and reorder jobs.
- 19. 19 Nobody likes being let down. You’re front line with the client. You’re the one they shout at when things don’t turn up on time. That’s why we give you an industry leading Service Level Agreement. There’s no room for ambiguity. Each product has a set cut-off – most are 10pm, although some core products can be sent to production as late as midnight. That’s when the clock starts ticking. You choose the turnaround to suit the client’s deadline. Speed it up, pay a little more. Slow it down, pay less. Whichever you choose, we’ll make sure your order leaves on time. If it doesn’t, we’ll make it up to you. Not only will we credit back what you paid, but we’ll rebate your loss of profit at an agreed rate. We wouldn’t be in business if we were paying out like that. So that’s why you can trust us to keep your promises – we dispatch early or on time 99.99% of the time. WE KEEP YOUR PROMISES
- 21. 21 The printing.com brand has heritage and kudos. It tells clients that you’re part of something bigger. For clients, we think it gives them the best of both worlds. They get you – an expert. A local relationship, embedded in their neighbourhood, to help them with ideas and creative design. And, connected to you, they get us. A big choice of print and display, welded together into an efficient UK-based supply chain. The result is a better product, at a lower price, backed up by local service and complemented by clever systems. Clients love that shit. WE MAKE YOU LOOK GOOD
- 23. 23 printing.com is exclusive. We only select one partner per town or city neighbourhood. That means we won’t licence the printing.com brand to anyone else within your defined exclusive geographic area. You are free to prospect for and trade with clients outside of your postcode area – nobody can ‘own’ a client – but you won’t suddenly find that the people across the road are also using the printing.com brand. In return for exclusivity, we expect a partner to promote the printing.com brand in their location and to use it to win business. If you had planned on using the printing.com platform to only feed your own presses, that’s fine – our w3p software solution is more appropriate. Read more at w3p.com. Since we have a mature and established network, it’s possible your preferred location is currently occupied by an existing partner. We may be able to suggest an alternative location or add you to the waiting list, as occasionally existing territories become available. WE GIVE YOU EXCLUSIVITY
- 25. 25 WE BRING YOU NEW CUSTOMERS AND GENERATE LEADS Your business will be listed in the studio directory on the printing.com website. As you can imagine, printing.com has a high domain authority and ranks well for many popular print search terms. As well as offline geographic exclusivity, we give you an exclusive postcode area as your ‘online referral area’. New clients in your postcode area, placing their first order on www.printing.com, are automatically assigned to your studio. You’ll receive the order, including payment into your bank. Then it’s over to you to make the most of the relationship. We find that partners who promote printing.com locally tend to get more orders and enquiries than those who don’t. If you actively promote the brand, with signage and marketing, you’re more likely to pick up some orders from strangers. If not, it’s unrealistic to expect the cash to pile into your bank account. With everything in life, what you get out is proportionate to what you put in. You have complete freedom to personalise your studio listing to drive local traffic to your page. Create sub-pages to showcase your portfolio and service offering, to lift you nearer the top of local search results.
- 26. training
- 27. 27 To get the most from our people, we believe in continual training and development. We hope you think the same. Your subscription includes classroom training at one of our regional centres. These induction courses cover designing for production, sales and technology and are for you or your team. If you’d like to send more people along, additional seats are available at cost. Last year we delivered over 1,100 seats across more than 120 sessions. These face-to-face sessions are topped up with remote webinars on specific topics. And if you’ve missed it or need to recap, there are lots of tutorial videos on our catch-up channel. Once you’ve learned the basics, you might be interested in some advanced courses to get the most out of specific parts of the printing.com system. WE HELP YOUR TEAM PERFORM BETTER
- 29. 29 Every item in our core range of bestsellers is competitively priced. You can trust us to deliver a premium product at great value. We think it’s fair that we reward our partners who spend the most with us. That’s why we pay up to 3% Qashback. Each quarter, we calculate your qualifying spend – things you buy from us – litho print, digital print, large format and ink-on-fabric. When you cross a minimum spend level, you qualify for Qashback. We credit your account a couple of days after the end of the quarter. The more you spend, the higher the Qashback tier. We’ll keep you and your team updated on your progress each week. It’s not unreasonable for a busy studio to recover some or all of their subscription fees in Qashback. WE PAY YOU BACK
- 31. 31 WE HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS Let’s face it, we’re all trying to grow our businesses. We all need to put in the marketing effort. We all have to be active networkers. And we all have to be streetwise and opportunistic. Becoming a printing.com partner doesn’t change any of that. However, together, maybe we can accelerate your growth. Maybe with our marketing and the power of the printing.com brand, we can help you sell more. Maybe with our clever technology and systems, we can help get more from your existing team, just by working a little smarter. With some training, maybe we can help your team convert more sales, miss fewer catches and end up with more happy clients. Wouldn’t it be great if printing.com’s online tools freed up your time to do more sales activity and less repetitive admin? To spend more time doing things clients value, rather than things that waste their time? And maybe, just maybe, if you put in the effort to personalise your local studio pages and promote the printing.com brand locally, maybe, just maybe, you’ll pick up a few new clients and orders along the way. Should we get started?
- 33. 33 WE DELIVER OUTSTANDING VALUE By now you’ve probably decided printing.com looks too good to be true. You’re waiting for the catch. It’s a million quid a year? Or we want the title deeds to your first child? Nah. Becoming a printing.com partner is surprisingly affordable. Especially when you add up what you might spend a month on cobbling together other things. For instance, we think you might be paying... MIS system (£50 pp, based on 2 person team) £100 Private client web-to-print template system £125 Card payment gateway £25 Ecommerce print sales site £130 Online proofing software £75 Digital asset management licence £50 Preflighting software licence £25 Stock images a month (based on an average of 8-10 images) £80 HTML Eshot campaign design time & software licencing £100 Direct mail campaign, design time & print £250 Total £960 Imagine you could get all this functionality – with a single-sign-on for your clients – not multiple logins. Imagine all that was in the box – for much less. And on top of that, you pick up a few new clients and the odd online order too. printing.com not only saves you money, it could make you money.
- 35. 35 M O S T P O P U L A R printing.com eStudio only Rights to use printing.com brand Keep your own brand Geographic exclusivity Sell own products offline Sell own products on printing.com Own brand public shop Listing on printing.com directory 0800 routing and call centre Telephone support Dedicated Account Manager Boutique on printing.com Online referral area by postcode Option to rent adjacent ORAs Hide all hub produced products Sell designer templates Create client templates Clients sign in and order at printing.com Extra client branded portals 10 10 Add optional Brambl licence System fee for own products £0.99 £0.99 Template fee click charge £0.00 £0.00 Initial fee £2,995 £4,995 Monthly fee from £299 £499 Minimum term 12 months 12 months Prices exclude VAT and are subject to change. A subscription is required and acceptance is subject to status. PARTNER WITH US If you operate a graphics business, you’re half way to becoming a printing.com partner. Get orders from the printing.com website and benefit from the printing.com brand exclusively in your geographic territory. Use our marketing, systems and supply chain to help win more work from your existing clients. To arrange a demo or ask questions, email licence@printing.com or call 0161 848 5717.
- 36. Third Avenue, The Village, Trafford Park, Manchester M17 1FG Grafenia plc is registered in England and Wales under number 03983312 Registered office: Third Avenue, The Village, Trafford Park, Manchester M17 1FG. VAT Registration No. GB 764 5390 08 printing.com is a trading style of Grafenia plc we are you email licence@printing.com or call 0161 848 5717 www.printing.com