Web to Print Marketing | Trollbeads, Lund Trading, and Frank Gumpert Printing
The Story
One of my proudest accomplishments in the last ten years was improving my company’s Web to Print process for providing our retailers with print on-demand branded marketing materials. Lund Trading served about 1,000 retailers in North America and the Caribbean who sold Trollbeads. These retailers had varying needs depending on their physical location, competition, product awareness, etc. We helped these retailers market their product through the use of an online print center.
The Problem
Our retailers believed that the company that I worked for should provide these print materials – including direct mail post cards, 64 page product catalogs, accordion brochures, etc. – for free. The cost associated with doing this would have proven too much for our company. So we provided a place online where our retailers could go to order the materials that they needed at cost. The problem is that this didn’t solve the issue with our retailers. The cost of the items was high enough that retailers didn’t want to purchase the materials that would help them sell more of our products. What’s worse is that they began to take the time and energy to try to create materials themselves to promote our products. Even despite these issues we were selling a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of these products at cost and were paying the company that was printing and fulfilling the orders to further off-set the cost.
The Solution
In October 2009, I began researching solutions. Within 90 days, we had a new online print center and our orders had increased dramatically. To give you an idea, we printed and shipped 500,000 64 page Storybooks, our Trollbeads product catalog, in 2010. We reduced the cost of the individual Storybooks by more than 30% saving our retailers approximately $200,000. And that was only one of the products we sold through the print center. We carried a variety of products including postcards, large format posters, perforated window clings, vinyl banners, duratrans & lightboxes, to name a few.
