Exaprint is a trade-only online print service with a value-added focus and ambitious plans for service development and growth.
Simon Cooper has worked at some of the UK’s highest profile commercial printers: 13 years at Precision Printing in Barking, where his father was a majority stakeholder, and then a stint at Pureprint in Sussex, helping to take a B1 offset house into the digital market.
He saw something different in his latest venture though. ‘What caught me with Exaprint was that the business model was not like anything else in this country. The closest was Printing.com but that was a franchise operation and it’s quite different to what Exaprint does. I think what we have seen since starting has backed up my belief that this was a business model that was missing from the UK, and we’ve seen that there is a good appetite for it.’
Indeed, Exaprint now reckons to have around 19,000 resellers in the UK. This is all trade business: the Exaprint model is to only work with a network of professional resellers and try to empower them to sell more to the market. It started in France about 16 years ago and was introduced to the UK two and a half years ago. It is spreading its tentacles though Europe, with operations in Spain and Italy too.
Mr Cooper emphasises the policy of only working to support the trade, and says that every application is checked and verified. ‘We turn away about 30% on the basis that they are not a printer, designer or marketing professional,’ he said. ‘Our entire purpose is to empower a group of resellers to get out in the market and win that end user demand. That means that without our resellers we have no business; we are not riding both horses: we don’t go direct to the end user, so we have to empower those resellers.’
Simon Cooper
Aside from its expensively assembled production facilities in Europe (the UK site is in Letchworth, Hertfordshire), the way that it empowers its reseller clients is through a range of different kits that they can use to fire their own customers’ imaginations. When a reseller is accepted they sign up for free and are given a £35 voucher to test the service and satisfy themselves with the quality and turnaround times. The welcome kit they receive contains samples of jobs such as business cards, flyers, brochures and special finishes such as the MGI JetVarnish and iFoil.
After three orders have been placed, they receive an Inspiration Kit, which is a more comprehensive pack containing a wide variety of unbranded substrates and samples and includes three swatch books, one each of paper types, wide format substrates and special finishes. ‘Hopefully the Inspiration Kit encourages their customers to buy a higher value product and will move their print away from things that they can only produce in-house. There are lots of samples of things that are less commonly obtainable from online print providers who typically go for the high volume commodity items. That’s provided free of charge. We want to get this into resellers’ hands so they can go into the market and have great success.’
Another recent introduction has been the ‘Mockup Collection’: a high resolution, fully layered .PSD file containing a product photo that designers drop their artwork into. This allows them to show a customer exactly how a finished product will look. The full collection has 160 mockups, but distribution of them is based on client status, with three tiers of Silver, Gold and Platinum, according to the amount of spend each reseller has with Exaprint.
Mr Cooper categorises Exaprint as being at the crossover point between online services that provide a fully bespoke service and those that expect the customer to carry out all the tasks with minimal human intervention from the service provider. The utilisation of Exaprint’s production scale means that resellers can take advantage of innovative print solutions without needing to invest in the equipment necessary.
The organisation has several plans that are in the process of coming to fruition in the near or longer term. Already in its home market of France it has started doing road show events to show partners how they can better succeed in the market, and it is planned to extend these to the UK. Mr Cooper said there is also a plan to open a physical location in the UK where resellers can pick products up and get more guidance on how they can be used. Exaprint is looking to deliver more training courses like the online Adobe InDesign and Photoshop ones it already offers, and in September it hopes to launch a mobile app that will allow instant pricing in front of the customer. Further ahead into 2016, it hopes to launch white label websites with a reduced catalogue of products in the UK, as it already has in France. Steps into labels and packaging have already been initiated.
In conclusion, Mr Cooper said that there is a lot more to come from Exaprint: ‘We are totally committed to helping people grow their businesses. We already have the widest range of products available on the net, with some high added value options; we have a comprehensive range of reseller tools to help them generate demand that has perhaps not been traditional for them; but we really feel like we are just getting started. There is so much more to come, not just this year but we are hugely ambitious for the future and a key part of that is getting closer to the customers.’
