“I had kept a photo-journal and had taken a photo of the Sydney skyline, which I wanted to gift to a family whose home I’d stayed in when I first arrived in Australia.
“So I ordered this print. But when it arrived, the colours really weren’t accurate.
“At the time it was very expensive to order prints like that and I thought to myself that these companies were just pumping out prints but not understanding colour accuracy at all. I knew I could do a better job.”
With his photography expertise as a basis Dahan began to create the blueprint for a photo-to-canvas e-commerce print business that would eventually become Parrot Print.
The challenge
Taking his first orders as a one-man-band at his parents’ kitchen table in 2016 and printing on an Epson SureColor SC-60100, Dahan says he realised very quickly that for the business to be successful, it needed to be scalable and to be scalable, it needed to be automated.
Reviewing customer queries and his own processes, he began to identify areas in the production line that could be improved and simplified through automation. Putting his photography and colour management knowledge and mathematical brain to use, Dahan set about developing an AI algorithm, based on numerous factors including pixel density and crop area, that would advise customers how well their image would translate to print, recommend optimal print size and correct colour output. This attention to detail paid off.
“I started at a really low level and it just grew over time. Within a year I was doing over a hundred orders a day and I couldn’t walk around the house any more with pieces of paper trying to match them with prints the customers had ordered. I was working 18-hour days, I’d taken over the entire downstairs of my parents house and their shed had become my warehouse,” Dahan says.
“There were articulated lorries trundling down a little residential road dropping off pallets. I realised some big changes were needed and automation was the key.”
The method
He began to build-in automation in “small iterative steps”, he explains. “I thought, if I could just automate this then I’d have more time to do that, and so on.”
With the business showing no sign of slowing down, Dahan recruited a freelance developer and they have worked together to write and implement more bespoke automation programmes designed to help streamline and scale the business, such as plugins that would process orders automatically as they arrived and a barcoding ID system for each print order so that no errors could be made from receipt to packing and shipping.
“That was the first thing really. The software had to be able to see what the customer order number was and then stamp a barcode on the image file. So we just started off with a really simple thing like that just to make life easier, and then it became something far more complex,” recalls Dahan.
He says the process of developing automation solutions for each step of the journey from photographic file to printed, framed canvas had thrown up many challenges.
“I think even with the file creation, for example, if a customer had cropped their image, the software had to see what the crop area was and had to interpolate it to resize the image and add the borders. It was really complicated. We were really scratching our heads, asking ourselves how we could create that file automatically. I think that was one of the biggest problems and there were lots of errors.
“Sometimes in the early days, when we were testing the software, it wouldn’t show the crop area that the customer had selected and the server would time-out before it managed to download the actual image. So there were lots of issues like that, that we had to work through,” he recounts.
Dahan emphasises the importance of small steps and continually making 1% improvements across the business, looking for areas where jobs can be made easier and production faster through automation and the use of robotics.
For example, packing station operators can now pack more than 100 parcels an hour, he says, without the need to press enter or print for shipping labels, they can just scan the print barcode and a label is automatically produced. Furthermore robotic framing devices, of which Parrot Print has three, can produce 70 frames per hour with one operator each compared with three people manually producing 70 frames per hour previously.
The result
Automation has indeed pushed Parrot Print to scale dramatically, growing its workforce to 18 full-time employees, outgrowing successive premises three times to date before buying and refitting its current home, a 745sqm facility in Welwyn Garden City acquired during lockdown.
The company’s equipment has evolved too: beginning with a small fleet of Epson 60100s, which were upgraded to 602000s and eventually replaced those over the last four years with six 1.6m-wide Epson SureColor 80600s.
“We’re now in a place where our servers pick 400 orders every 20 minutes,” says Dahan.
“A human doesn’t see them. They get dropped into hot folders, which are hoovered up by our printers and automatically nested and sent to print. From there it goes to a robotic cutter, which again uses a barcoding system so it picks up the job in the file, cuts it out and sends it on to the framing machine.”
Most recently, in September last year, the business became the first in Europe to install an EFI Vutek Q5R UV LED roll-to-roll printer, which Dahan says has taken over almost all of the photographic printing work and addresses growing demand for one-off, high-quality wall art from consumers and professional photographers.
Dahan says the device, which can print up to 672sqm/hr, is “phenomenal” and highlights its key role in ensuring the business can keep up its global next-day delivery service as its growth trajectory continues apace.
“We track order cycle-times in minutes, so from when an order is placed to when it is boxed and we’ve had it as low as 14 minutes. For us, speed is extremely important and the automation we’ve implemented enables that for us, because essentially it’s just a machine and all the gears start turning once an order is placed,” he explains.
Dahan says that without the level of automation now operating on the factory floor, the speed at which his company has grown and the success of its operation would have been impossible.
“It would be a nightmare without this level of automation, it’d be chaos,” he states. “I think the staff like working here as well because it’s just so organised, it’s tidy, there’s no chaos, everything just runs really smoothly.
“Nothing goes wrong, no one can get sent the wrong order. It’s impossible. It means that with no errors in the system, it’s just less stressful for everyone involved because no one ever has any worry hanging over them. They can just do their job and they go home happy,” says Dahan.
He says as well as efficiency, staff happiness and wellness was a key consideration of his in designing the factory layout at Welwyn Garden City. All workstations have been designed on what he terms “a McDonald’s model”, where staff don’t need to take more than three steps in any direction to carry out their tasks, while the building itself has been fitted with lots of open space, a breakout area, a staff gym, a separate floor for office work and maximum glass to boost light levels.
According to Dahan the business has experienced triple-digit year-on-year growth since its launch, with sales rocketing by around 500% after the first lockdown in 2020.
“I think because we had all the software and automation, it was very easy for us to continue to scale. We just added more packing stations or another printer or whatever it was we needed to deal with the demand. We were in a very fortunate position because our warehouse is quite spread out and we don’t rely so much on manual work, our people have lots of space within the warehouse and could stay safe.”
Dahan says the business will continue to target more than 100% growth annually and states there is no reason why it shouldn’t be achievable.
Looking ahead, he reveals they are on the cusp of launching five new print products to market, details of which he keeps close to his chest, but which he expects to achieve the same level of growth and help Parrot Print to fly high.
COMPANY PROFILE
Parrot Print
Business location Welwyn Garden City
Inspection host Matt Dahan, founder
Size 18 staff
Established 2016
Products and services Customised printed products
Kit EFI Vutek Q5R, six Epson SC-80600s, two Esko Kongsberg cutting tables, Canon Pro 4000s, three robotic framing machines
Inspection focus Implementation of technology to maximise productivity and flexibility
TOP TIPS
“Always keep your end goal in mind and work your way backwards from that point,” says Dahan. He feels that starting with small tasks that would most benefit the business and building from there in an incremental way has been key to his success.
Listening to employees regularly about what would improve their daily work and help them to carry out their jobs is a vital part of not only running a streamlined, efficient and consistent service, but critically a happy, healthy and motivated workforce, according to Dahan.
Getting the right person for the job is crucial for every job across the business, Dahan says, so the business uses pre-employment testing service Test Gorilla to screen every candidate from machine operatives and office staff to customer support and software developer roles. “We use it for everyone we hire and it’s really good for giving people the best chance to show their skills and knowledge and making sure the people you hire actually have the skills you need,” he states.
