Jon Lancaster is not one to sit still. The founder, owner and programming brains behind online print business Printed Easy has meetings stacked one behind another. He strides in carrying the laptop that is a constant companion. He flips it open to demonstrate a recently introduced feature: users can now configure split deliveries via the website (up to 100 addresses he says); then how Printed Easy can create precise costings for its new Scodix 6000 Ultra SHD and then to show how popular the examples in its expanding library of rotary label dies each has been. The data to run his business is literally at his fingertips.
The projector which beams the laptop screen to a white wall is about the only object in the first floor boardroom. Otherwise it is more than uncluttered – it is spartan. There are shelves which in other companies would hold samples of recent work produced; but here they are empty. Lying on the boardroom table, there are just three printed sheets with Scodix work on them: two with flood coating, one with gold foil. Nothing more.
Windows look out on to the factory floor below, or at least on to the line of finishing equipment, ranging from Renz to Kolbus, Horizon and Heidelberg. A vast flat roof encloses the environment controlled room housing seven Indigos in air conditioned comfort while a six-colour plus coater Speedmaster XL106 is hidden from view. It is an array of technology to cover applications that Printed Easy offers online and can deliver next day if required: posters, leaflets, books and labels. Just order before the 4pm cut off.
The Scodix was installed almost four months ago and also sits in its own environmentally controlled space along with two Autobond laminators. Another room houses four AB Graphics Digicon lines for finishing labels printed on two of the Indigos.
Much of this is the result of investment in the last three or four years, a mark of how successful the business has become. In 2021 the company reported revenue of £8.5 million, leading to a pretax profit of £2.3 million: in the year to 30 September 2022, revenue had risen to £12.3 million and pretax profit to £3.7 million. Staff numbers grew from 44 to 51, giving a per capita turnover of more than £265,000, which Lancaster reckons (without much argument) is the best in the industry.
The rate of future growth at Printed Easy may ease back from these levels, but the company will not ease back on a determination to continue to invest and develop.
A new Renz line, for automated production of wire bound books, will be the first of its type in the UK when installed in the coming weeks. The Scodix was itself the first of the Ultra 6000 SHD models in the UK. Printed Easy is not afraid of being an early adopter of new technology. It is clear about how that machinery should perform and that is the expectation.
But the machinery is just the visible tip of the iceberg. Beneath lies a sophisticated pricing, workflow and ecommerce technology that allows a print job, any job, to flow from inception on the online portal to packed and ready to ship with no human intervention – to 100 destinations if required. In 2022 this IT infrastructure underwent a complete rebuild says Lancaster. “It was a big project,” he says. “We ended any relationships with WooCommerce and other third-party applications. Every feature we have is now native to us. This gives us greater flexibility in how we develop in future. It was a really big milestone as what we had previously had been around successfully for five years.”
In short if it works, Lancaster is prepared to break it for something better.
The change was necessary, he explains, in order to be able to expand the range that Printed Easy offers and to do so without increasing the workload on staff, using full automation in other words.
Future developments must rely on software not manpower. The split delivery function typifies this. The way the industry has always provided split delivery is to sort and pack boxes by hand which are then labelled and sent to different addresses. There may be some level of automation to create combinations of products for separate delivery. None, says Lancaster, has the power and versatility of what Printed Easy can now do.
“We can deliver a different combination of products, of differing amounts, whether on pallets or as parcels and our software allows us to do this to 100 addresses a time,” he says. This has not been tested to the full extent yet, but 20-25 separate deliveries with mixed quantities and multiple products to each, has been accomplished – all through the online portal.
The user is guided through a simple to understand interface, automation picking the largest and therefore most expensive package to head the list and qualify for free of charge delivery. Accurate pricing is applied to each of the subsequent packages.
“There is no limit to where we can send it in the UK; the software covers the mainland, all the islands, Northern Ireland, with different couriers accounted for. It took us four months to build and was introduced as a service in April,” Lancaster says.
“We might have 20 versions on a pallet with mixed quantities for each delivery point. They might in turn have a different number of label rolls with a different number of labels on each roll, different qualities of brochures, posters and banners. And there is full digital tracking for each. We are the only online printer than can offer this to this level of sophistication.”
The ability to do this is not a widespread requirement, but the fact that it exists can be enough to win another more straightforward job, Lancaster says.
To date Printed Easy is running a few hundred orders of this nature a month. He points out, from experience no doubt, that Printed Easy’s responsibilities end when the job is picked up by the courier or couriers in question. If the packages arrive late “don’t blame us. That’s for the courier to sort”.
He adds: “We get the job and process with no human involved, customers get courier tracking for pallets and parcels.”
The pricing is also calculated automatically so that the heaviest package or pallet qualifies for a free delivery offer and subsequent deliveries are paid for according to courier charges for each.
As with everything else, Lancaster’s attention to detail homes in on the different rates for couriers, how some slip in extra charges when fuel prices increase or for congestion charge zones. If others are happy to apply a blanket charge and hope that it covers the full cost of delivery. Lancaster wants to be in full control.
Lancaster then dives back into the order to show how, even when the order has been completed and locked down, it is still possible to accommodate a final element that was otherwise forgotten, a banner perhaps. This safety net is part of the appeal as is the end to end automation and tracking of the elements making up the complete order.
The final flourish is that the order can be placed for forward shipping, so a chain of restaurants or pubs for example can bring together the different elements needed for a campaign being rolled out across each of its outlets according to what they need by way of print and branded material for a key date in a few months’ time, Mothers Day for example. Collateral delivered too soon can be damaged or lost and will certainly be in the way.
“Before we had very strong products,” says Lancaster. “Now the services we offer through the website are very very strong.”
Those products, while specified online, are not restricted to the usual line up of commoditised print products. Printed Easy might offer its firepower of three B2 Indigos (two 12000 HD models and a 100K), two SRA3 machines and two WS6900 machines for labels, to ultra short run or perhaps personalised products.
This, however, is not the company’s target market. It works, not for individuals ordering book of one or similar, but for brands, agencies and other resellers who enjoy the convenience of ordering online without the restriction of standard format products. From the outset Printed Easy has enabled customers to specify the format of the multi-sectional products that they want.
It chose not to dive into the commoditised pool where the cheapest for 5,000 A4 flyers wins the job. While Printed Easy is quite capable of this type of production, it chooses not to compete in this way, earning a reputation, according to Lancaster, for being more expensive, a perception that is no longer accurate he says. During Covid, the emphasis was placed on software developments, which stood Printed Easy in good stead when sales recovered.
Its revamped website makes ordering bespoke products even easier, allowing buyers to enter their own formats and specifications and seeing the price change instantly.
Printed Easy does not want to have to employ additional account handling staff for bespoke work or as the business grows. Automated systems are there to take the strain.
It certainly works for the man in charge, who appears tanned and relaxed. Likewise staff on the shopfloor are unflustered and seemingly happy. “We are not trying to be everything for everyone,” he says. “We focus on what works and that leads to a better quality of life, not just for me but for everyone in the business as well.” The company car is the Tesla, and there are 14 of them in the car park.
Pricing for different papers, different finishing, lamination and now Scodix foiling is generated instantly thanks to the power of the pricing engine that the company has developed with Lancaster as the lead. It is, he says, about making it possible to describe and order products online that would normally be bought offline.
The portal is equally adept at pricing for self adhesive labels, a sector where there is less competition than in commercial print.
“We have been late to the web to print market in the UK,” says Lancaster, “and even in labels we were not the first in the market. We were always seen as the most expensive online printer, but as everyone else has been forced to increase prices it seems that on brochures for instance we are not that much more expensive any longer.”
Labels is perhaps where Printed Easy has an advantage. None of the other large trade printers currently offers a roll fed label service. The market is scarcely big enough to justify it Lancaster explains. “And folding cartons is not an online product.”
The labels area too has undergone significant upgrades in the last year. As well as printing digitally, the company primarily cuts using a laser cutter. However, certain customers were not always pleased with the finish, particularly with the slight fringe that seems to characterise laser cutting.
While the laser is very fast and automated Printed Easy needed something more. “We could not go any further with laser cutting. We needed to add rotary die cutting inline,” says Lancaster.
That it has done and Printed Easy now holds a library of 700 or so different dies, some of which have been brought out and reused some 30 or so times over the course of a year. All this information is, of course, logged in the cloud.
The explanation for the relatively few dies the company has is that many labels are regular shapes, round, elliptical or square with rounded or straight corners. Dimensions may vary, but format does not as much, so die formats are rarely limited to one customer.
The selection of the dies, and every other product that Printed Easy can deliver, is made through the online portal. If a new die is needed, it can be made and delivered within three days, if not it is simply pulled out of storage and is ready to go.
Printed Easy is not aiming at consumers or small business purchasers, so there are fewer images to illustrate products than on many websites. Instead it works for resellers each in turn servicing a spread of customers. Crucially, Printed Easy is not about being the cheapest in terms of already highly commoditised products, say A4 leaflets or small brochures. Instead it expects that everything printed will be a bespoke size and has optimised its way of working as a consequence.
This can be complicated. There are five press formats to account for, says Lancaster, let alone the options in terms of finishing. “That,” he says, “is where I’m good. It is the core of this business. It is not just about selling product, but modelling production for all outputs and variations.”
The Scodix comes into this way of thinking. When Printed Easy was first set up, investment in a Scodix was under consideration. At that point the volume of work requiring that kind of embellishment could not justify the investment. Now the volume of work has expanded and, even if only the same percentage will require embellishment, it is now a small percentage of a much larger volume, amounting to the volume of work required to justify the digital press.
However, it is not a plug in installation. Scodix has a pricing mechanism provided as part of the software needed to run the press. This works on the ripped file, assessing how much polymer and foil will be needed much as ink use can be calculated, and it has been accepted around the world. But not in Letchworth.
Printed Easy has wanted to generate a highly accurate cost well before the file is ripped. This Lancaster has managed, dividing the sheet to be embellished into areas, choosing a spot or flood UV effect, flat embellishment, raised or braille, single- or double-sided foil, foil over foil and which colours of foil will be required. And then the different press formats. The options would appear endless.
Three months after installation Scodix has not been launched to customers and not because there are issues. There aren’t. Lancaster planned for a four-month project and then to launch embellishment on only a limited set of products, 15 initially and then building up over time.
“It’s why we had to build our own polymer price calculator,” he says. “This is going to be great for design agencies: a brochure for an upmarket hotel might have foil on the cover and then inside pages with spot UV to highlight certain rooms and features. First we will start with leaflets and flyers and add the rest over the next 60 days. And of course everything will be fully automated.”
The portal has the capacity to show the foil, flat UV and a raised UV effects, enabling that agency to make an informed decision. Once submitted the job goes into the workflow where Enfocus Switch directs it to build an imposition then with the sheet filled, connects as necessary to the Scodix front end workflow.
The quality from the SHD version of the Scodix technology is now adjudged better than deliverable through hot foil stamping. This is because registration issues and foil positioning are not the issues that they can be with the traditional production method. The imposition scheme does not therefore have to take distortions into account.
The press can take up to three rolls of foil, supplied by Kurz in nine colours as part on an onsite library of effects. The company will learn quickly which metallic effect scores for its customers. It then joins the other processes and products in the Printed Easy portfolio which are under constant analysis as Lancaster strives to reduce whatever touch points remain and to raise the sophistication of the automation. Like Dave Brailsford in cycling or Sir Clive Woodward in Rugby Union, Lancaster believes “it is all about the 1% marginal gains all the time. Eventually that leads to profits going up.” And they are. In its lasted published figures, Printed Easy reported Ebitda of 43%. “And that has increased every year,” he says. “And each year gross margin increases.” He projects growth around 14-15% in a flat market for the current financial year.
It means that the company can buy a piece of equipment like the Scodix without worrying about finance arrangements. Nor when the time comes to buy the second. For now the focus is again on improvements to its software. Lancaster has tried working with ChatGPT to cut out some of the repetitive work involved in coding. It helps, he says, but in the sense of giving direction. “It sometimes gives you the answer you want, but you still have to do the modelling.
“We want now to focus on the back end, on the website and its functionality. That’s where the biggest gains will be made. There is so much potential there, there’s so much more that can be done with software.”
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