Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam is one of the world’s busiest hubs. It is home to KLM and millions of passengers arrive or check in each year confident that the Dutch airline will deliver them to their destination in safety.
There are parallels between the airline business and Print.com, not least in the travel imagery that the online print operation has adopted enthusiastically. Founder and CEO Marco Aarnink describes himself as Captain; the leaders in each territory are ‘country captains’; customers are welcomed on board and exhibition stands are designed like check in counters with prominent piles of brightly coloured luggage. The website is adorned with aircraft seats complete with tray tables, references to take off and destinations – the only missing element being the safety demonstration and card. Then when Print.com acquired Dutch printer Simian recently, the announcement came with a short video of Aarnink flying to the print factory in a single-engined aircraft.
The apparent obsession with airlines and flight is neatly explained by Aarnink. Airlines call their loyal customers “frequent flyers”, Print.com’s customers are instead frequently ordering flyers. A fun pun.
The branding unquestionably helps Print.com stand out in a way that chimes with its audience of graphic professionals, whether these are other printers, designers, marketing agencies, marketing departments within a brand, all of which are buying copious amounts of print. Many Aarnink points out are also buying from traditional suppliers in largely traditional ways. He wants to change this, making Print.com into one of the largest online print hubs, with appropriate IT tooling as part of customer’s daily workflow, in Europe and beyond at the same time.
But it almost did not happen.
Aarnink had earned his place in the online print revolution through establishment and then the sale in 2014 of People & Print Group (known by the labels Drukwerkdeal and Printdeal) to Cimpress (Vistaprint). He had enough money to walk away and to indulge a passion to help start up and scale up technology businesses. It never quite delivered the same level of satisfaction. He says: “I found that I really missed doing business with customers, with colleagues and suppliers. To really develop products together – what it means to be an entrepreneur.”
He then saw that the domain name Print.com was available to buy through a broker from an investor in the US. He thought there was only opportunity to flip the ownership to people he knew in the industry. “The idea was to trade it on,” he says. But word got out that Aarnink had bought the landmark domain and so did the suggestion that he was planning a return to the business. He recalls: “I thought that if there was so much attention on what I was doing from the printing market, perhaps I should try it myself again.” He decided to test the level of interest, getting his team to build a small website with a few paper-art images to gather attention and lots of registrations. Within a very short while, 6,000 people had signed up.
“We started to call them to ask why had they done this and what did they want from us. They told us everything,” he says. He had tapped into something. Aarnink decided to formalise the interest, staging the first of what he describes as co-creation events on Valentine’s Day in 2018. The date was not entirely coincidental. “I do believe that a customer relationship is like a romantic relationship, you have to go through various comparative phases to build a really good relationship,” he explains. “We invited these people on a special date, letting them do the talking about what it was we would need to build and what we would need to get them to buy in.
“They told us everything about where they were buying now, why there were certain products they wanted that they couldn’t find in the Netherlands.” In terms of a focus group this could not have been bettered, perhaps because there was no extant business to defend and anything that emerged could do so with a clean slate.
That feedback was enough for Aarnink to set the ball rolling. Print.com started out with a website featuring the products and especially services that other companies still could not supply but which he had just been told customers wanted to buy. The standard products would be added later.
From the outset the concept was to have a closed website selling to the trade (graphic professionals) rather than one with prices displayed to appeal to the micro businesses and consumers (end customers) that other websites target. These are customers that will switch between suppliers on the basis of price alone and more importantly do not buy often. They are the equivalent of budget airline passengers flying to the sun for a holiday or short break. They are not the customers that are welcomed into airline lounges to be treated with a higher level of respect, services and free nibbles.
There are no open prices on the Print.com website, these are released when customers have booked their seats by checking in. Then Print.com is not aiming at irregular purchasers of print. It wants to work with resellers that are ordering print every day. “We needed to be part of their daily workflow and to make it easy to order from us,” Aarnink explains.
However, not everyone welcomed the return of Aarnink. The online print industry and even the non online industry did not want a new competitor in their midst. It meant says Aarnink that “it was difficult for us to find the right suppliers at the beginning”, suggesting that some of the potential print partners were asked to think about where their best interests lay, with an existing relationship or with the incoming disruptor. In order to secure its supply chain Print.com was forced to invest in its own facilities, firstly for digital and large format products and then for apparel printing. “That showed the market that there was no stopping us,” he says. Print.com had taken off. A general production hub, with offset printing, was added in 2023.
Just as airlines add routes to expand their networks, so the online printer expanded beyond the Netherlands, first into Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Spain, Italy and France and most recently making the hop across the North Sea to the UK. “The UK is something of a different venture because of the pound and the fact that it is overseas which means that it can be difficult to ship products from mainland Europe. The UK is also a first step towards entering the US. If we succeed in the UK it is going to be a lot easier to take the next step into the US. We find that there is a good vibe between printers in the UK and printers on the continent, which bodes well.”
The easy talk of international expansion seems to belong to the situation a decade ago when online print brands were expanding rapidly, when Cimpress was making acquisitions such as Tradeprint and Pixart, when Bluetree and Solopress were in growth mode and many others were starting to sell online.
Today Aarnink admits that phase is over and that the market is slowing down, caught between drives for sustainability which is driving down volumes as average order values reduce to cut out waste, and the economic uncertainty that leads to much the same result.
The disruption is forcing many printers across Europe out of business, constricting the pool of suppliers that the online printer might work with.
“Right now it’s all about consolidation,” he says. Print.com is taking advantage of the trend. The acquisition of Simian falls into this category. This is a well equipped five-year-old 23,000m2 factory at Groningen in the north of the country. It runs two long perfecting B1 Komori Lithrone HUV, several HP Indigos and a Landa S10P supported by Durst and Canon large format printers. 5,500 solar panels adorn the roof. However, while built to support three online print brands including Flyerzone (which had once been part of Printing.com in the UK), owner Wouter Haan was never able to completely fill the factory. Print.com can bring the work to absorb much of that capacity.
The B2C brands will continue, aiming at a different target group to Print.com – the (micro) businesses and individual consumers who are not used to buying print frequently. “We will need to find a way to stand out in this part of the market, and to make price less important as a factor in their choice, through the product range, through customer service and delivery options,” he says.
It is a change of focus for Print.com too in terms of owning its production base for while it had acquired apparel printer Brezo and then large format printer TMB Image Center in 2019, it has relied on a network of outside suppliers for much of its production requirement. A number may lose out with the shift to inhouse production.
“Simian was ready to be bought by a strategic party,” says Aarnink. “If we hadn’t bought the company it would have been sold to one of our competitors within the next couple of years. That would definitely have been a mistake had we let that happen.
“We were growing faster and we need reliability in the supply chain leading us to needing additional capacity. The overall market is definitely slowing down and many potential suppliers are closing and more will close within the next couple of years.
“Simian may not have had enough volume to fill the print capacity, we had those volumes already. In this market, it’s all about achieving economies of scale and volume.
“The market is also changing. In our vast array of products, the volumes of letterheads, business card and envelopes are dropping while there are new printed products such as promotional giveaways, labels and packaging and clothing and apparel where demand is growing. You need to change fast and adapt to the new circumstances.”
Print.com does this through co-creation sessions following the model of that first Valentine’s Day meet up. “We organise these events a lot, inviting buyers from different target groups, give them some inspiration, food and drinks and talk and listen a lot about what they are looking for: it’s all about providing them with convenience,” he says.
The epitome of this convenience is the Amazon store where everything is available to buy through one click. The UK has been one of the fastest adopters of this convenient way to shop, thus leading the way in adoption of ecommerce. That applies to print as much as to books, household appliances and clothes.
Print.com’s own experience of providing branded polo shirts for exhibitions for example is not all about blind orders placed online. One provider’s XL size can be different from another’s expectations. The feel of the textiles used needs to be part of the purchase. This area still needs samples and discussions between the customers and the company’s agents on the ground. This is what the business now has in the UK.
Print.com took its first steps in this country in the second half of last year and has a small team in Manchester talking to both customers and suppliers to expand the network and establish the brand.
This is in contrast to Germany, where despite being home to the largest online print businesses – Flyeralarm, Saxoprint and Onlineprinters itself – French or German buyers, says Aarnink, are relatively conservative and will prefer to continue to do business in their traditional way. “German customers are simply more loyal to existing suppliers compared to the UK and Netherlands where people are ready to try different ways of working,” he says.
There will need to be a network of UK suppliers, because both the North Sea and the new reality with regard to customs presents a challenge to delivery from the Netherlands. As the UK builds business may reach the point that Print.com needs to have local production through a UK acquisition.
Like the Netherlands, many existing UK businesses and potential suppliers, are being lost to the market through insolvency or retirement, leaving fewer options for Print.com to strike relationships with. This too may trigger a decision to acquire a UK production facility. Right now says Aarnink the imperative is being able to achieve economies of scale in production with central rather than distributed facilities.
The acquisition of Simian delivers this for the business. It has announced that it will merge its own very much smaller production hub into the Groningen factory. The second imperative is to find specialist suppliers able to deliver the additional finishes and products that are beyond the usual and which Print.com can add to its expansive product database. Part of the company’s success will be in offering products that others do not, and perhaps identified by its co-creation events as the sorts of product that customers in different sectors have said they want. Aarnink mentions branded pencils as something that is in demand but which the company is unlikely to produce from its own resources, instead calling on its network of suppliers.
This is where Print.com has an advantage over competitors Aarnink says.“As we get used to lower average order values, we know we have to reorganise our production facilities to cope with shorter runs. This is something we welcome as we can make more margin on smaller runs than on longer runs where there are more competitive prices.
“With shorter runs there is a shift from offset litho to sheetfed or even webfed inkjet. Simian is better equipped for this change than many of the incumbent competitors who have invested heavily for one style of work and may find it more difficult to adapt.
“The platform approach we have used means it is easier for us to make decisions on what we send out and what we produce ourselves.”
The platform approach means too that there are advantages for the site’s users in that it is easier to incorporate into their daily routine: becoming part of their routine and workflow making Print.com the locked in preferred supplier.
This will also pave the way for the next phase of corporate development. Print.com employs a team of 25 developers. “We are really part of the tech industry,” says Aarnink. “Like Amazon we are trying to be a platform and a one stop shop for all types of printed products and for marketing needs.
“For example, we bought the company Converdy, a tool that allows you to easily convert a design from a print-ready file to a digital landing page or simple website. This means we are not restricted to thinking about print. We can access their marketing spend whether digital or in print.”
It means too that the company can attract younger people than would be attracted to the mainstream of the printing industry.
Today the internal marketing teams at brands are considered co-creators for Print.com, and involved in discussions about their future use of print, requirement for innovative products and into applications that go beyond print.
Any requirement to expand the Print.com offering into digital marketing areas should be picked up ahead of time. Currently this is a service for the future as Print.com builds trust as a preferred print partner for its customers. In terms of an IT service, building online portals for internal use or as white label sites is possible today.
“Likewise we can help advise our production partners on automation to help make them more efficient,” adds Aarnink. “We can share product trends and information with them, so help inspire our print partners to improve.”
The company has a further secret weapon, deployed to great effect at Drupa and at other exhibitions: the Dutch Stroopwafel. This is a sugary confection that is best eaten warm and freshly made. The company takes this to every show and it draws a constant flow of people guided to a stand a few aisles away by the scent wafting through the air.
