Commercial cyber-printer iPrint is changing the way Americans fulfill their
stationery needs.
Every businessperson knows that shopping for business cards,
stationery and other printed items can be a real pain. The entire process –
from poring over huge catalogs of logos, colors and typestyles at the local
printer, to filling in the little blocks of text while trying to envision what
the end product will look like – is time-consuming and often disappointing.
The worst part usually comes after the ordering and waiting
processes are over, when the cards or stationery come back riddled with
mistakes or looking plain awful. And in today’s competitive business
environment, where companies are becoming increasingly aware of their
customers’ perception of their firms, image is everything – and poorly
constructed promotional materials can tarnish that image.
Enter Redwood, Calif.-based iPrint,
the Web’s first interactive, What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) commercial
print shop. In 1997, the company introduced the first "Discount Printing
and CyberStationery Shop of the Future," and today is a completely
self-service Internet application that facilitates the design and ordering of
printed materials. Founded by former Deluxe Corporation executive and T/Maker
Software Company co-founder and chairman Royal P. Farros, iPrint is working
toward redefining the relationship consumers have with commercial printers.
"Because of our Internet technology, we offer the best across-the-board
printing prices in the country," says Farros, iPrint’s CEO. "And
because we're on the Internet, we're open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
There isn't a more convenient way to create and order items like business
cards, letterhead and checks."
As the corporate world’s most popular stationery item,
business cards were the first products supported at the firm’s introduction.
iPrint then began offering a full range of business and consumer items during
the following weeks and months (with Farros citing imprinted golf balls as one
of the company’s “hot” items), including letterhead, envelopes, business and
personal checks, business forms, personalized sticky notes, endorsement and
address stamps, labels and more. The company, which tripled its staff to 57
employees (25 percent of whom are in customer service) in 1998, expected an 8
percent to 10 percent revenue growth in 1999.
In addition to Farros, other key employees include Letty
Swank, vice president of strategic relationships, and Dave Hodson, who runs the
company’s technology department. Farros refers to Swank, Hodson and an
additional person, Mike Ruben, as the core team that helped him start the
company. “I funded iPrint’s first year and a half with about $750,000 out of my
own pocket, ” says Farros, who still depends on a board of advisers gleaned
from the printing, venture capital and Internet industries for support. The
online print shop, which received $3.3 million in first-round venture funding
from Information Technology Ventures (ITV) and Intel Corporation, recently
announced that the company's total order growth rate skyrocketed more than
1,400 percent during the last 12 months.
Though Farros says his company goes head-to-head with a pack
of competitive demons that drives his team to success, the firm has few, if
any, bona fide competitors. And Farros isn't afraid of those who do challenge
him, since his company’s innovative, proprietary system and elaborate backend
setup would be hard to duplicate in a short period of time. He explains: “Our
Web site is only the tip of the iceberg. For instance, we spend a lot of time
working with our backend printers to connect into them. The process would take
years to duplicate, and by then, we’d be way ahead of [where] we are today.”
Positioned in a rather strategic place geographically –
right between Excite and At Home Corp. – iPrint operates from a
10,000-square-foot office building that was built to the company’s
specifications. “If we had listened closely enough, we probably could have
heard the recent merger talks going on between the two companies,” says Farros,
laughing, adding that creating a pleasant work environment for his growing team
was of utmost importance when it came to building his office space. “We wanted
to create a really pleasant place to work, and we’ve made a really great
environment with very little office politics. Put simply, it’s a real
‘together’ work environment.”
At the core of iPrint’s online operations is a completely
push-button, "self-service" design environment where consumers can
actually see what they are creating. The iPrint technology is the first and
only desktop publishing engine of its kind for the Internet. This self-service,
WYSIWYG design environment plays an important role in iPrint’s ability to
reduce customers’ printing costs. "Reprint-due-to-error rates – often as
high as 10 to 20 percent – have been killing commercial printing prices for
years," says Farros. "Our customers see what they're ordering before
they order, which means there are no surprises for the customer, and more
importantly, we don't have to build in a 'redo' charge like everyone
else."
While iPrint obviously improves the creation cycle, it also
speeds up the entire printing process from start to finish. Once considered
labor intensive, virtually every step in the iPrint printing loop is automated,
including supplying high-quality, camera-ready electronic images to commercial
printing presses. And printed products are shipped within two days of the order
being placed. "No other commercial printer can do what we do on the
Internet,” Farros comments. “It's why we can offer great prices, convenience
and service, and why we think we're redefining the way consumers will work with
commercial printers.”
Farros continues: “We bring decades worth of knowledge in
interface design, desktop publishing, kiosk development, electronic
order-processing and commercial printing to introduce the most complete,
fully-automated, self-service online creation, ordering and commercial-printing
environment. We used information from our work in the industry in the early
'90s, and knew what quick print shops were doing and how terrible that process
was.”
According to Farros, iPrint’s mission is to redefine the way
people work with commercial printers; establish a long-term relationship with
customers based on value and satisfaction; and combine smart work with hard
work, seriousness with laughter, and risk-taking with business intelligence.
“Traditional print shops are just not interested in spending a lot of time with
someone who is only going to make a $10 to $20 purchase,” says Farros. “From
our point of view, if a customer wants to jump on the site and play around with
a design and manipulate it for eight hours, they’re more than welcome to.”
iPrint’s target customers include the mass of consumers that
know how to use a bank ATM machine, but don't feel comfortable using the
standard graphical point, click-and-drag, pull-down-menu type of interface. It
also includes those computer-savvy consumers that simply want the fastest, most
convenient way to create and order commercially printed items.
“We’re an electronic print broker, but we’re not just
turning over the order,” Farros explains. “We’re also eliminating the pre-press
for our commercial printers, and we’re primarily business-to-consumer and SOHO,
but we also work to bring the printing industry online and have established a
number of strong, private-label relationships.”
Put simply, iPrint’s offering encompasses mass
personalization and customization products, including stationery items like
business cards, letterhead, labels and sticky notes; business form items like
purchase orders and invoices; and specialty advertising items like T-shirts,
baseball caps and coffee mugs. From the firm’s site, customers can create
professional designs by themselves, verify design, authorize payment, and move
the electronic order through the commercial printing plant in a completely
hands-off way, thanks to the company’s totally automated system. (Farros adds
that this process is usually an exhaustive and manual process for commercial
printers, which adds significant cost to each order.)
As a result, Farros says iPrint has virtually no online
competitors and is, in fact, challenging the traditional printing establishment
with dramatically lower costs, better service and higher customer satisfaction
rates. And, perhaps most importantly, customers see exactly what their designs
look like, reducing the frustration of re-doing print jobs because of an
unexpected result. “One of our biggest philosophies is that we are our own best
customer,” says Farros. “What we need is what our customers need, and when you
get to the persnickety end of our customers, that’s me. It’s impossible to get
that level of service at any traditional store.”
In Farros’ eyes, the Internet is a "stateless" environment in
that it doesn't actually "remember" anything – instead, it simply
goes where it's pointed. “This is great if you're an information service, as
virtually 100 percent of the Internet is today,” he explains. “It's awful if
you want to actually create something, as you would using a desktop
application.” To solve the problem, iPrint's "Interstate" and
"Intrastate" technologies can turn the stateless Internet into a true
application environment, one that not only remembers what customers did between
pages, but also what they’re doing within a page and what they do between
editing sessions.
They say that a business is only as strong as its weakest
link, and iPrint is no exception. According to Farros, scaling operations is
one of his company’s biggest challenges. When you start churning out hundreds
of thousands of orders a day, he says, and if your system is not totally
automated, then it will break down everywhere. “We don’t control all of the
automation because we’re connecting a bunch of mechanical processes, even
though we have clustering and load-balancing systems built into our own
servers. If, for example, the traffic suddenly goes through the roof, then we
can handle it. But the orders have to go to, and information has to come back
from, our back-end printers, all without overwhelming them.”
The problem was brought to light recently when, while
working with one of the largest printers in the country, iPrint received a
frantic call to stop a specific promotion within only six days of its launch
date because the printer couldn't handle the volume that would follow. “These
printers have been doing this stuff forever, but have never had to handle the
concentrated spurts of volume that we’re delivering to them,” says Farros. “Fortunately,
because we can both start and stop things quickly on the Internet, we were able
to stop. It’s not so much that the printer is a weak link, but that our
delivery of a brand new sales channel is sometimes overwhelming for them.”
According to Farros, the other major challenge is finding quality
employees in a tight labor market. In Silicon Valley, where he compares the job
market to a “free agency,” employees are hard to find, to say the least. “It’s
a completely different mentality than that of the '80s and early '90s,” he
explains. “Your have people who are joining startups and are making just as
much money as they would if they worked for an established company, but with a
lot more on the options side – all without risks and/or pay cuts. We’re also in
a period of unprecedented venture capital availability, so you literally have
tiny companies that are better funded than many of their large-firm
equivalents.”
To solve the problem, Farros relies on his company’s
pleasant working atmosphere, innovative concept and growth potential to attract
and keep employees.
For the month of December 1998, iPrint was voted the top
merchant in the "Books & Stationery" category by more than 33,000
voters on BizRate, an independent
e-commerce ratings service. "What is particularly newsworthy is that we
beat out such well-known sites as Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, Hallmark,
American Greetings, and even Martha Stewart as the favored site," says
Farros. "We were also rated one of the top three sites in our category in
terms of best product selection." Each merchant rating is based on a
"Customer Certified Report Card" that grades each company on categories
such as price, ease of ordering and customer support. In addition, iPrint was
named by CAP Ventures as one of the Top 14 companies impacting the printing
industry in 1998.
For Farros, these accolades, combined with the tremendous
growth iPrint has already achieved, are music to his ears. “We believe that
we’re revolutionizing our end of the printing market,” he says. "Like the
leaders in other e-commerce areas, iPrint.com is benefiting from the Internet
tidal wave hitting the world. We don't see any sign of slowing down – our business
continues to go through the roof."
Name: iPrint
Location: Redwood, Calif.
Founder: Royal Farros
Founded: 1997
Industry: online commercial printing
Employees: 57
Revenue: undisclosed
Copyright © 2000 by Virtual
Advisor, Inc. All rights reserved.