The launch follows Mimeo’s 2011 acquisition of the UK-based CLE Group.
Mimeo corporate strategy vice president Charlie Corr explained to PrintWeek: "We’re trying to leverage what the acquisition of CLE brought to us and CLE focused on specialty products like school planners, yearbooks and funeral stationery. We are looking at specific niche opportunities where we believe we have a competitive advantage."
Corr suggested CLE’s success in the funeral market in the UK convinced Mimeo executives there was an opportunity in the US, noting many funeral directors here are still producing their own documents in-house using local devices and simple templates.
"You don’t have the highest quality and you don’t have great substrates and if the quantities get high that increases the challenge," he said. "The true cost of them doing it was pretty high, and for the funeral home, the printed piece is what people walk away with - that’s their value proposition.
Increasingly funeral directors are now looking for programs that can be printed digitally and include a full color picture of the deceased.
With Mimeo’s Gateway platform, high quality funeral stationery can be delivered the next day. Funeral Directors can simply go to an online interface and work with the customer to select designs.
Personal information is entered online, followed by the approval of a photo-realistic proof. Once ordered, stationery is immediately transmitted to one of three Mimeo owned and operated US digital print facilities that feature Kodak NexPress and HP Indigo presses.
"We can provide a better looking product while saving time for people procuring," said Corr.
Mimeo was founded in 1998 as an online document/printing as a service provider and its three main businesses are documents, wholesale photo production and fulfillment for online sites such as Snapfish, and specialty print products.
"There are other opportunities beyond school planners, yearbooks and funeral stationary, but we can only launch so many things at any one time," Corr said. "So it’s more gated by our ability to address these opportunities."
Going forward Corr said Mimeo is looking at the higher education publishing market by providing course packs for colleges, where the company’s combined process improvement with rapid delivery, would provide a strong advantage.
"We can also provide them with a marketplace where students can order something and get it as early as the next day," he added.
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