Hanson joins Germany-headquartered Flyeralarm after six years as UK manager of Dutch B2C photographic printer Albumprinter.
He took up his role in November at Flyeralarm’s new London sales and marketing office in Paddington, which opened the previous month.
Flyeralarm closed its West End store in September and its two employees relocated to the German head office. Hanson has been joined in the new office by former Saxoprint employee Divyesh Chotai, who is now Flyeralarm’s UK business development manager. Hanson said that he and Chotai had spent the last two months identifying areas to focus on for the UK business.
“I like Flyeralarm because even though it’s very grown up, it’s always in start-up mode, accepting of new ideas and ways of doing things, but with a brilliant customer ethos," said Hanson.
“The online commercial print market in the UK is a little bit behind some European markets from what I’ve seen. However, what you realise very quickly is that while it might be starting a little later here, it does accelerate very quickly once customers start to realise the advantages, whether that is in prices, quicker delivery or more products available to them.
“It’s about being disruptive but not necessarily by being the cheapest. Our business strategy isn’t to undercut everybody, it is to bring customers from offline print into online and show them what they can do.
“From market research there is a shift happening at pace between offline print orders and online print. What we want to do is tap into that market shift.”
Flyeralarm chief executive Thorsten Fischer said Keith was the “ideal candidate” to grow Flyeralarm’s UK arm.
Prior to joining Albumprinter, Hanson was sales and marketing director of the UK arm of CeWe Color, where he turned the UK business from loss to profit in two years. He began his career with Honda after completing a degree in international business studies.
Founded by Fischer 15 years ago, Flyeralarm produces brochures, merchandising, 3D prints and flyers from 15 webstores across Europe. It has more than 3 million different product variations and Hanson said the UK generated around 1% to 2% of its overall €330m (£280m) turnover.
