The group, which relaunched the website on 27 October, said printed.com was an "evolution" of the Digital Print Partnership, which started life as a wholesale trade operation before being developed into a site increasingly used by designers and SMEs.

Tangent has backed the new venture with an advertising spend that will exceed £300,000 starting with promotion on Google before targeting other search engines.

The website product range is initially focused on leaflets and flyers, greetings cards, business cards, brochures, stationery and calendars.

Nicholas Green, executive director at Tangent, said printed.com was an opportunity to give businesses and customers "an easier way to buy high-quality print".  

"Clients are viewing our online offering as an easy, accessible way to buy into high-quality digital production. From designers to SMEs, the site gives customers the opportunity to offer digital print to their clients without capital investment," he said.

The relaunch coincides with the group expanding its digital print firepower with the order of its latest HP Indigo 7500 digital press, a machine that will complement a fleet that includes HP Indigo, DesignJet and Scitex machines at its Newcastle site.

Tangent’s online charge has been self-funded thus far, but the company said it will need to move to a longer term strategy "to ensure we can build scale and barriers to entry that ensure the print asset in Tangent is both protected and expanded".

Green would not be drawn on the exact details of any new finance, but said Tangent was "excited by the future" and would explore a range of investment options to "take advantage of the opportunities present in the online print market".

The launch of Printed.com comes on the back of Tangent’s half-year results in which pre-tax profit grew by 34% to £928,000 in the six months to August 2011.

Sales from March to August were down £759,000 from £11.8m as the firm began to replace high-volume work with high margin services.

Timothy Green, chief executive at Tangent, said he expected that revenue trend to turn upwards helped, in part, by fee income services from its Tangent Snowball customer insight agency, which constitutes 70% of sales within the software and communications segment.

He added that the firm is moving away from a dependency on large budgets from single clients to growing sales through more customers.

Key to this strategy is printed.com, which Tangent said would allow the company to focus on higher value digital print products and in turn, improve gross margin.

Tangent's new website printed.com can be found at http://www.printed.com/