However, the smaller, fiddlier market for online sales of personalised and bespoke versions of giftware, garments, stationery, hats and mugs, is still relatively open. Entrepreneurs who do their homework and set up the right online presence, backed by a flexible manufacturing and delivery chain, can make a tidy living.
Rather counter-intuitively, it seems that personalised products are selling well because of the squeeze on people’s incomes, not despite this. Although individually the items cost more than mass-market equivalents, it seems that the “thinking of you” aspect of personalisation means that people don’t feel obliged to buy more expensive items just to make an impression. A personalised keyring, tote bag, mug or t-shirt costing a few pounds can say it just as well as an upmarket bag or scarf.
Rob Harbord is in a good position to take advantage of this. His specialist web-to-print company AlwaysPersonal in Hull has been at its busiest at this time of year, as people looked around for gifts that mean something but don’t have to cost a fortune.
For the past three years the ‘personal’ side of things has been facilitated by Harbord’s adoption of the Zakeke online customisation system, which acts as the customer-facing front end of his online ordering system. So far he has set up more than 1,000 customisable products. “Our main customer base is B2C but we also deal with B2B. We are hoping to offer more for the B2B area as we do really well at producing high volumes using jigs, etc.”
All products and their personalisation options have been set up by Harbord and are entirely “owned” by AlwaysPersonal within the Zakeke system. It’s the effort that goes into creating these that’s the main intellectual property.
Customers see the branded AlwaysPersonal website with its menus for products, but when they click on a customisable product, they go into the world of Zakeke which serves up the options and creates the production-ready files if an order is placed.
Customer personalisation options usually include uploading and placing a picture, and/or adding some text based on pre-defined fonts and colours. Zakeke’s production-ready files are typically PDF for print, although other formats are possible. AlwaysPersonal offers engraved items too.
When the order is placed, that information is actually going straight into AlwaysPersonal’s CRM, to be processed and passed on to production. “All our systems are fully integrated into a custom order processing software we have developed. Artwork is downloaded when an order drops in and routed directly to the correct printer,” says Harbord.
Once the order and artwork are in, AlwaysPersonal has a battery of printers and finishing systems to produce short runs and one-offs, using paper, card and a store of blanks such as mugs, shirts, mats and so on.
The main printers are a Mimaki UJF-6042 UV-cured flatbed inkjet and a Mimaki CJV 1.6m solvent roll-fed printer-cutter for vinyl labels and transfers. There are also Sawgrass small-format and Epson F6300 wide-format dye sublimation transfer printers, for polyester-based garments and coated substrates such as mugs and coasters. There’s a battery of heat presses to transfer the dye-sub ink. Tajima embroidery machines are used for badges, names and the like on garments.
A pair of Trotec lasers can etch metal and also cut acrylic or card and engrave wood. The larger one is 1,000x600mm format. A Metaza metal engraver is used for key tags and the like. “Next year we are hoping to add a CNC machine to help us produce more bespoke wood items,” says Harbord.
What is Zakeke?
Zakeke is an Italian company based in Milan. It’s been offering its cloud-based SaaS visual commerce platform since 2017 and says 60 people work for it. In the UK it is represented by Ken Johnson.
Brand and content manager Alessia Dozzo says Zakeke’s purpose is “helping brands automate operations, increase revenue streams and reduce manual tasks, thanks to its real-time 2D, 3D, AR and ‘Virtual Try-On’ customisation features.”
Users create their own ranges of customisable products using Zakeke’s Visual Product Customiser utility, and then publish them online via the Zakeke cloud, invisibly linked to their own e-commerce sites.
Dozzo says: “Products and catalogues can also be imported from other print-on-demand services like Printful, Customcat, Printeers or any other service with API, or they can be created from scratch and then applied to existing products.”
Although Harbord says he isn’t using them yet, Zakeke offers facilities to not only set up 3D models with customer previews of their personalisation, but these can optionally be linked to augmented reality (AR) previewing through a smartphone display. You could maybe preview your personalised cushion in place on your own sofa, or a canvas print on your own bedroom wall. Virtual Try-On lets customers preview spectacles and sunglasses on their own faces – Zakeke says it is also developing this for garments in future.
Zakeke can also plug into ready-made sales platforms, so customers don’t need to create that side of things either. “We can connect and manage multiple sales channels to one single account,” says Dozzo.
“These are the different platforms where people sell customisable products, such as Shopify, WooCommerce or Etsy. This allows people to share all customisable products among several platforms and manage all orders and stores from a single Zakeke account.”
How does the pricing work? There’s a free 14-day trial, then you can decide to commit to a monthly or annual plan. “Our pricing plans have a fixed monthly fee starting from £13.93 plus a transaction fee starting from 1.9%,” says Dozzo. “The transaction fee is calculated on the final product price excluding any tax and shipment. It is calculated on each item, not the entire value of the cart. It has a minimum price floor of 2p.”
The basic plan allows for 10 publishable products. For £34.93 per month you get up to 50 products with a 1.8% fee; and for £90.93 you get up to 100, with a 1.7% fee. If you pay annually there’s a decent discount. Custom plans can be arranged.
Why choose this one?
“We were approached by Zakeke in 2020 by Ken Johnson,” says Harbord. “We arranged a demo of the software and knew immediately it offered more functionality and flexibility for both us and our customers than any other software we had tried.
“We tried countless different designer packages for our website and never found one that offers everything, until we found Zakeke.”
How did the installation go?
Very smoothly, says Harbord: “The integration was very painless; it took a couple of days to complete the website integration. During this time, we worked on getting ourselves familiar with the software.
“Over the course of three to four weeks, we set up all our products onto Zakeke, this process was nice and easy due to the simple UI.”
Is there anything else he’d like it to do? “There were a few features that we thought Zakeke lacked, particularly in the back-end which other software we have used had. Once I spoke to Zakeke I realised they were very open to suggestions and ideas. Over the course of the last year or so we have seen at least 10 of our ideas and suggestions come to fruition. We have a few more in the pipeline which Zakeke are launching soon. I like to think we have also helped other retailers.”
So he’d do it all again? “Without a doubt we would recommend Zakeke to other companies who offer any sort of custom product on their website. Ken Johnson has been brilliant and whenever we have had any issues or problems, he is there to offer his help.”
SPECIFICATIONS
Product SaaS product customisation with integration into standard web-to-print and sales platforms, with API customisation options
Platform Cloud-hosted with web browser access; no infrastructure needed at user end
Price From £13.93 to £90.93 per month
Contact Zakeke www.zakeke.com k.johnson@zakeke.com
Company profile
AlwaysPersonal has its origins in a company set up in 2010 in Newcastle upon Tyne. The websites and goodwill were bought six years ago and moved to Hull by D3 Office, an office supplies group that Harbord was working for. It was later decided to split the businesses, with Habord taking on responsibility for AlwaysPersonal.
“During this time we have increased the business by 500%,” says Harbord. “We have expanded the product offering and worked tirelessly with Google Adwords, SEO and general marketing. We moved about half a mile from our old unit last year due to expansion and growth.”
Five people are employed full-time, but this doubles for seasonal peaks, such as Christmas.
Why it was bought...
AlwaysPersonal had struggled to find a customisation package that met its needs, until it tested the Zakeke system
How it has performed...
It has enabled AlwaysPersonal to set up and display more than 1,000 customisable products, with delivery of production-ready files and integration with its CRM order handling system.
