“We want to be the Cisco router for the printing industry,” says Martijn Eier, founder and chief executive of Cloudprinter. “We are a platform for print buyers and print providers to get into contact with each other.”
Two years ago this was literally true. But even with spectacular growth rates, Cloudprinter is only scratching the surface of what might be possible. Ahead of lockdowns, sales in March last year were up 50% on the year before. Business was put on hold for the next eight months, waking up around the world since the turn of the year. Now, week by week growth in business is running at 10-20%, he says.
Cloudprinter is a child of the API and App age. It is not an online print website like fellow Dutch business Helloprint. As such, there is no Cloudprinter home page where print buyers can specify business cards or order A4 flyers at competitive rates, no tools for designing a banner or T-shirt. “It is a technical platform to route print and to fulfil print,” says Eier. And there are currently 167 printers spread across 104 countries as the destination points for print orders. “We’re just getting started,” he adds.
That business is about digital print, in the main photo products amounting to 5,000 different products in all. Again this is scratching the surface of the range of printed items that can be described in digital terms and loaded into a production workflow along with a digital job ticket to trigger the production process.
That print business might be anywhere around the globe. It does not matter to the software, but does matter to the business or individual placing the order. Cloudprinter enables the kind of cross border transactions that are at the heart of the internet.
The scenarios are endless. A photobook focusing on a baby’s first year, designed and purchased in the UK, can be printed out in Canada and delivered to the child’s grandparents in Toronto. A British student can order an academic text book from a publisher in the US and have it printed just a few miles down the road – copyright permitting of course.
Digital printing is key, says Eier. “We don’t believe in litho.” He explains that it can make sense to print thousands and tens of thousands of the same brochure in a central location and deliver these to outlets in neighbouring countries because distribution is a minor element in the overall cost of that sort of job. With a print run of one, shipping can contribute disproportionately to costs and to a carbon footprint, something eradicated by printing and shipping close to the point of need. This can be one of the 167 printers that are currently part of the Cloudprinter network.
Anyone can join, says Eier. There is no mandate requiring any particular supplier or piece of equipment. This makes sense because each country will have a different bias in terms of press supplier. A manufacturer that has a dominant market share in the Ukraine may have only a small share in Denmark, for example. And of course the HP Indigo, built in Israel, is absent entirely from some countries in the Middle East.
A printer joining the network is expected to submit his equipment park to the operation. This enables the application to ensure the printer only receives jobs that can be produced – not everyone has a perfect binder for example, or can cope with case bound books. The printer will be expected to submit samples of work to check quality and will be expected to meet service level agreements that enables Cloudprinter to achieve the overnight turnarounds print buyers are looking for.
Buyers do not know who is producing the work. The software does this, using location, price, suitability and performance over the previous 90 days, to select which printer gets which job. Companies signing up are told to expect to handle 200 jobs each day after the initial 90 days. This stipulation tends to favour those with automated workflows.
There are two models to win jobs, one through an API, the other through an App. The API can be embedded in a website selling products that need to be printed, photobooks for example, where there are integrations with Taopix and Photobox software. It could be wedding stationery sold through a website where the main focus is on apparel and print is an add on. It might be personalised posters, it might be manuals for an electronics company with a worldwide market and with different quantities needed in different countries. In this case the application removes the quantities from a spreadsheet and directs these jobs to multiple suppliers at the same time.
Other customers might have links into their own ERP, while others will take orders from Amazon online stores. Every order is treated as an order of one, Eier says. Even a batch of 100 manuals is treated as 100 single copy orders by the system, pricing according to the unit price set by the printer with a handling fee added by Cloudprinter.
While the population of Cloudprinter partners is relatively low, price competition is negligible. As more come on board, there may be a temptation to cost job types too keenly in order to win orders. The counter to this is the growing number of buyers that will use Cloudprinter. Currently this element is expanding faster than the print providers. “Print buyers have been keen,” says Eier. “Printers seemed to be holding back. They could not see how we would be helping their business. We are now going in the right direction.”
That growth will be part of the remit of Tim Cox, who has joined Cloudprinter as business development director. He stresses how the demand for distributed print services accessed via the cloud is increasing faster than there are printers. “For a printer it is easy to come on board,” he says. “It takes a couple of emails, checking a few print samples and linking up via Enfocus Switch. It’s no more difficult than pitching for any print brief.”
Once part of the network, Cloudprinter’s analytics kick in. There are service level agreements for response times, for accuracy and consistency. This may be more stringent than printers are used to. If so, meeting these targets can have a beneficial impact on a company’s more quotidian work.
The data that the company provides will also show longer trends: what buyers are specifying, what digital presses are in use. At the moment demand for academic books is topping the list ahead of photo products, with demand for home textiles on the increase.
The concept is that one PDF can be sent across the network for local production. This has, however, come up against reality, says Eier. A text book might have 400pp which, in Germany, printed on 80gsm paper, results in a 20mm spine. In Russia the standard is to use 72gsm paper so the same book requires a thinner spine. Cloudprinter makes the adjustment to suit the calliper of the paper rather than force printers to buy expensive 80gsm papers.
The issue is more complex still in textiles. “Different textiles are used in different parts of the world with different print specifications which makes it difficult to create standardised products. It’s against our strategy and ambition, but sometimes we will have to have products that are restricted to only one region,” he says.
Cox’s role will be in helping printers to join and to use the network. There is no reason why a printer should not also be a customer, using the Cloudprinter network to handle products it does not itself produce or to manage remote production for a loyal customer. Cox explains that this is the network effect. “When you sign up as a printer, we get a bigger offering that can benefit everyone in the network. Everyone is a potential customer, even those that have their own managed networks because we may be present where they have a gap geographically or in terms of a product.
“We will approach printers where we have a gap in the network and where customers want support. So we need to fill gaps in China and Chile, for example. You can think of it as outsourcing to a trade printer, but with an international outlook.”
There is also to be a white label version of the software that can be used within what amounts to a VPN with a full integration into MIS and ERP software on one side and to production workflow on the other. This is coming later this year, says Eier.
And as normality returns later this year, Cloudprinter will be able to be out visiting printers. This is as much to check working conditions for staff as much as to see what technology is in place.
“We take the social dimension very seriously,” he says. “We have received funding from the Dutch government so this is very important. Because of Covid we have not been able to visit printers: those visits are now starting to take place again.”
This is equally important to the new generation of buyers that Cloudprinter wants to work with. It is not about the price alone. Today’s buyer wants the print to reflect the corporate ethos that he or she has and the way that they work.
If they are selling their services online, the internet is the logical place to turn to find a print supplier. Cloudprinter wants its network to be the logical place to discover that supplier.
