LFP - Large-Format-Printing

printedcom heads toward becoming an ecommerce printing giant, with the help of HP Indigo Digital Printing technology

Wednesday 15. August 2012 - Make it easy, risk free and affordable. These are the watchwords of printedcom, one of the UK's fastest growing sources of quality printed products. As an online print ordering business, printedcom relies exclusively on HP digital printing systems - primarily HP Indigo Presses - to print orders to exacting quality standards within tight turnaround times.

printed.com is run by Tangent, a leading UK-based integrator of technology and marketing services. After several years of using its ecommerce platforms to serve mainly the wholesale print trade, Tangent relaunched its online business as printed.com in November 2011. The new site, offering a
large range of print products and backed by a total customer satisfaction policy, took off quickly. Just four months after launch, printed.com already was servicing thousands of printers, designers and small businesses throughout the UK.
Nicholas Green, founder of Tangent and printed.com, gives some insight into the brand: “At printed.com, our underlying philosophy is to provide customers with the highest quality product, quickly and at a fair price. We achieve this through an advanced user experience and top-of-the-range digital printing, based on HP Indigo Presses.”
Tangent invests heavily in its digital printing plant in Newcastle and has been using industry-leading HP Indigo digital printing for five years. The company recently purchased two HP Indigo 7500 Digital Presses, and printed.com uses them together with its HP Indigo press 5500 for all commercial print jobs. Large-format applications, such as banners and posters,
are printed using HP Scitex LX600 and HP Designjet L25500 latex printers.
“With our huge emphasis on quality, the natural choice for printed.com was HP,” says Green. “We continuously monitor the market place for innovations, and the market consensus is that HP technology is the most advanced. Because we use HP Indigo Presses, our customers understand that we are serious and can be confident that we’ll deliver top-quality prints.”
printed.com’s commitment to quality is key to its success. As Darell Butler, a graphic designer at UK graphic design and print company Kaleidoscope, sums it up: “We use printed.com for a variety of different things and have found that the quality
of the print and finishing is comparable to litho. This is what makes printed.com so strong; it has the price, quality and flexibility that litho can’t provide.”
HP Indigo quality and versatility drives value
printed.com offers a wide range of products, including business cards, leaflets, flyers, perfect-bound documents, and posters. Currently, customers submit ready-to-print PDFs, but printed.com is creating an open system that will support multiple formats and further improve ease of use. Quotes are given in real-time, and most jobs are turned around within 48 hours from order to delivery. With a strict money-back guarantee policy, printed.com gives its customers the confidence of risk-free printing. That, together with short timelines, means that printed.com essentially gets only one shot at a job. There’s no time for re-do’s, and they’re seldom needed.
The versatility of the HP Indigo Presses enables printed.com to offer a very wide product range on silk, gloss and uncoated paper stocks ranging from 100 to 350 g. “We get fantastic substrate flexibility on these HP Indigo Presses,” says Ian Gordon, operations director. “In a single day, we might use as many as 20 to 30 different stocks or finish combinations on the same machine. We can do that because changing between stocks on the presses is very quick and easy. This enables
us to provide our customers with maximum choice, while maintaining high productivity and profitability.”
Giving back to the environment
Reducing the environmental impact of its printing is another driving force at printed.com. It was shortlisted for the industry-leading Print Week Environmental Company of the Year in 2011, and it has earned Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) and ISO 14001 accreditations.
“We take our environmental credentials very seriously,” says Gordon. “We only buy FSC stock and we recycle 98 percent of our waste. If it can be recycled, then it’s recycled.”
The future looks bright for printed.com and HP
printed.com currently prints around 3.6 million full-color A4 pages per month with its HP Indigo Presses, and it is continuing to grow at a fast and furious pace. The number of active customers is almost five times higher than Tangent’s ecommerce site had a year previously, with the majority of the growth coming since the launch of the site. Always striving for more, printed.com plans to use massive marketing and technology investments to drive growth and productivity even further.
“We are very serious about building the largest ecommerce printing brand possible, and we have chosen the best technology by partnering with HP,” says Gordon. “We want to help our customers build their businesses; we want to be good to the environment, do our bit for the community, and benefit from business growth. And we want HP along for the journey!”