Bryan Shirley took over as director of Bluetree Connect in April, moving across from the Bluetree POS bespoke POS brand, which has now ceased operating. Shirley has been joined by four other staff on the brand that launched in the autumn of 2014 but was previously manned by just one part-time member of staff.
Shirley said: “We had enjoyed massive success in the last few years with Bluetree POS but we analysed the margins and realised that we weren’t making the same level of margins we were from the standard products.
“We could see this emerging requirement to link up automatically with the supply chain, therefore we made the decision to move our energies onto this and so far it is building like a skyscraper.
Since Shirley has taken over, the brand has also been given a new website and CRM system.
“The capability of what we could do hasn’t changed much but the resource support and marketing support to push it forward has,” he added.
Bluetree Connect works with clients to automate the print procurement process in order to help reduce transactional and administrative costs. It is aimed at helping print managers that deal with major clients on a regular basis, looking to automate the various processes involved with print procurement.
Shirley said that in the two full months since he has taken over (May and June), Bluetree Connect’s sales have risen 300% and 550% respectively on the same months in the previous year, leading it to currently be the fastest growing Bluetree brand.
It currently makes up around 5% of Bluetree’s approximate £28m turnover and Shirley is looking to get this figure to around the 10% mark by the end of the financial year. Last week alone it processed 320 orders and 478 jobs.
“If you’re buying 50 million A5 flyers over a year, split over 10,000 orders, we say rather than having people taking time to manually seek prices or process orders, cut that out and agree a price upfront for the year,” added Shirley.
The brand makeover comes as Bluetree's Route One brand announces a summer investment of around £5m, which includes three new Horizon StitchLiners and a Horizon three-knife trimmer, along with significant upgrades in the litho and digital press department.
Bluetree, which mainly operates from a 9,290sqm production facility in Rotherham, is also comprised of web-to-print brands Instantprint and Instantprint Pro.
