However, consumer applications are emerging for personalised print that people actually want and are prepared to pay for, such as calendars, cards and photo albums, personalised for themselves, by themselves.

This is really personal print. The words and pictures may be the buyer’s own, those of friends or family, or related to their heroes and hobbies, and are wrapped in emotions and memories that often celebrate a special occasion.

Getting this close and personal is both a blessing and a curse. The good thing is that customers perceive a value in what they are getting that is way above the production cost, making these jobs highly profitable. The downside is that as the job is, well, personal, and when problems occur the client can take it very personally indeed.

“I’ve had people threaten to murder me because their calendar has gone missing,” says Createagift owner Marian Stefani. “People are emotional and irrational.”

Stefani has had more experience than most in producing print for consumers, having started selling personalised cards and calendars through tie-ins with national newspapers 11 years ago. Back then orders were received by post and run out on colour copiers. More recently the production has moved onto HP Indigo digital presses and ordering has gone online, but changing technology hasn’t altered the trickiest parts of the business, which are attracting customers and dealing with them.

When it comes to attracting customers it’s a completely different world to the business-to-business world most printers are used to.

Personal relationships
Bristol-based Remind4u, which offers greetings cards and calendars based around an online reminder service, has even paid for television advertising in the run up to events such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Marketing director Miles Clee admits that it’s an expensive business and adds the firm also does what he terms “lower-level, better-value marketing such as e-shots”.

Affiliations are a popular way for consumer print firms to win business. Remind4u, for example, has linked up with Premiership football clubs Manchester United and Manchester City, and magazines and television shows Nuts and Top Gear, whose content it has licensed for its cards, calendars and posters. At the moment customers have to click through to the Remind4u website from those brands’ websites, but the firm is working on technology to embed its service into its partners’ websites “so our products are on their virtual shelves,” says Clee.

Createagift’s Stefani has worked hard to develop relationships with brands, special interest groups and the public directly. “We have a relationship manager marketing to magazines and TV,” she says. They work on generating editorial coverage and developing reader and member offers, and the firm also uses public relations to get editorial coverage. “It’s really luck and legwork and getting good PR,” she says. Nevertheless, the benefits can be huge.

“We got a piece on This Morning with Phil and Fern, and three days later we got swamped by the volume of work,” she says.

But while PR and an exposure to the public can have its upsides, Remind4u’s Clee warns of the pitfalls; the firm had a problem fulfilling orders for Valentine’s Day only to find itself lambasted in The Sun “thanks to a kind customer”.

At that point the firm had been using a third-party printer to produce its orders, but has since brought production in-house. It installed two HP Indigo machines citing the need for control and flexibility and the need to have its own production capability to secure bigger contracts.

Createagift started in the consumer print arena and added commercial print as a way to capitalise on its investment fully. “Three years ago we were just gifts and totally seasonal,” says Stefani. “We’ve widened the product range, but it’s still seasonal. Our busy time is October, November and December.”

Stefani questions whether any firm could get by on highly seasonal consumer work that only used the presses three months of the year. She also warns that you need to plan for extra capacity, should your application take off, to ensure you can handle the orders you receive in the turnaround time promised. That’s not just a case of finding firms you can call on for outwork, there’s also dealing with the public.

“Speaking to a member of the public is not like speaking to a design studio,” says Stefani. “You’ll have people who don’t even know their own postcode.”

Createagift, therefore, has dedicated staff to man the phones and a script for them to work from.

If that doesn’t put you off, where can commercial printers find applications to turn them into consumer printers? The digital press manufacturers are promoting consumer print as a cash cow and perhaps the biggest buzz around is in photographic applications.

Digital photography’s rise has led to a massive change in the way photos are used. Although the total value of the photofinishing market in Europe is rising only slightly at 2%, according to consumer electronics market research firm Understanding & Solutions (U&S), hidden within that relatively flat total figure is the annual growth of 150% in what the firm terms photo speciality products.

Customer access
“The real growth is photo speciality, which is essentially everything done by a digital press,” says U&S senior consultant, imaging and consumer electronics Simon Bryant. The predicted growth rate of the market in the UK is staggering. Between 2006 and 2011, the volume of work is expected to rise 481% to 2.6 million units, worth £185m (€259m).

There’s good and bad news for commercial printers. The bad news is that if you want to target the consumer market for photo speciality then you face a struggle. “The key thing is access to the consumer,” says Bryant. “90% of access is online and they’re going to where they bought photo prints before. There may be opportunities to support online photo portals, but there are lots of [photofinishing] firms banging on those doors. There are much more realistic ways of filling a digital press.”

In 2006, the UK market for consumer photo books was around 290,000 units, worth an average of £40 each, generating £5.7m. However, the UK market for professional photo books was 150,000 units that sold for an average of £323 each in a market worth £49m in total. These higher-value, lower-volume products are nearer the kind of products a commercial printer could take on, and a relationship with professional photographers may be easier to take on than one with consumers or a portal.

At the moment there’s no firm information on the non-photo side of the market, but U&S intends to research the market for non-photo cards and calendars in the next few months.

Richard Moross founded Moo to support social networking and photo-sharing sites with printed products. “It all started with the vision of how to take these amazing online ideas offline,” he says. Moross was a designer before striking out with Moo. He saw an opportunity to use print to extend the potential of social networking into the real world. “Forget Facebook, the business card had been around for 300 years, but there was no consumer version,” he says.

Paper with personality
Which is where Moo comes in with its MiniCards, NoteCards, postcards and stickers. Users go to the firm’s website, moo.com, and can personalise their cards and stickers with their own or others’ pictures, designs and type. “You give a piece of paper a personality that starts a conversation. It becomes a social object,” says Moross.

Having come up with these simple products, which are little blank canvases for people to make their mark on, the firm takes advantage of the community aspect of Web 2.0 with customers coming up with new uses for those little bits of print and sharing and discussing them. “Customers come up with lots of ways of using the things,” says Moross. “It’s like Lego.”

There are hundreds of uses being found and shared for these small blank cards you can personalise with any image you like. One of the more bizarre, but endearing, applications is one Japanese customer’s tailored ‘Moo-nopoly’ board game.

Being online, the firm’s reach and customer base is global. Partnerships with firms, including photo sharing site Flickr and social networking phenomenon Facebook, provide a huge audience. Moross estimates the potential customer base is 200 million and Moo already has customers in 140 countries. The business is split 55% US, 35% Europe and 10% Asia. “We had no idea how popular we’d be outside the UK,” he says. That worldwide popularity led to growing pains as the firm needed to quickly adapt its software to support the orders it was receiving in Hebrew and Japanese. “We needed Unicode font support really quickly,” says Moross.

Despite its global reach, Moo isn’t an especially big company, but it is growing rapidly. From six people at launch it’s now 20 and sales are £2.7m.

Print enablers
While the firm is based on enabling consumers to use print in clever ways, it doesn’t actually do any of the printing itself. For Moross the clever stuff is the software and systems for taking and fulfilling the orders, and the hardware and processes for finishing the work.

Print is outsourced to neighbouring company 1st Byte. The Clerkenwell-based digital printer’s involvement is a result of old-style social networking. “I’ve known Lawrence [Dalton, 1st Byte managing director] since I was a baby, he lived in my road,” says Moross. At the moment one print partner in Clerkenwell and the services of the Royal Mail via its Mount Pleasant office just up the road, is enough for Moo to serve the world, but Moross knows he’ll be looking for more print partners overseas to enable the firm to fulfill closer to its customers.

He reckons there are more Moos out there and his advice for those who want to follow in his footsteps is: “Partner with consumer market experts and keep the consumer at the core of what you offer.” He adds: “Look at new spaces on the internet for ideas.”

There’s no doubt that there is a market for consumer print for firms that can solve the challenge of dealing with the public, which is the bigger issue than the print itself. “If the workflow is strong and the company is set up to manage it, then it’s a licence to print money,” says Stefani. “The upside is you can generate tremendous volume at tremendous margins.”

She claims that each sheet produced can generate £2 and Remind4u’s Clee says the cost to manufacture what he sells for £2.99 is about 10p. But Stefani cautions there is a downside: “If you get it wrong it can be very expensive. If you were to ask me whether a printer could add a digital press and just do it, I’d say no. If you have a relationship with a brand, then yes you could, but the industry is over-selling this.”

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CONSUMER PRINT
Technology requirements
While the consensus of those that are making a success of printing for the public is that the equipment isn’t that important, there are certain minimum requirements before you can get involved.

At the heart of things, unsurprisingly, is the need for a digital colour press with a workflow that can handle personalisation.

All the big players, including HP Indigo, Kodak and Xerox, offer suitable machines. There’s no clear winner in terms of technology, but HP Indigo seems to have the edge. Consumer electronics market research firm Understanding & Solutions (U&S), which monitors the photo book and photo gift market, estimates HP has captured 80% market share with printers in that sector. U&S Senior consultant for imaging and consumer electronics Simon Bryant attributes HP’s success more to its acquisition strategy, and the workflow and software than to the print engine itself.

By covering both the front- and back-ends, Bryant says HP’s software has given the firm access to photofinishing customers who are familiar with the workflow from their photoprocessing kit.

Software and, in particular, web-to-print applications are essential. Createagift owner Marian Stefani couldn’t find what she needed, so the firm wrote its own. That software, RedTie, is now sold to other printers that want to get into the market. Other web-to-print firms are also getting interested in the consumer market, with Transeo Media launching a photo album product, MediaAlbum, at DPW.

The final thing that Bryant highlights for this market is the ability for the installed equipment to be able to handle many different types of media.