Boxglo provides a personalised chocolates service for business use and consumer use

X1 Print has used Catfish web to print systems to offer a print and fulfilment service to its clients, including Boxglo, a personalised chocolate box website.

The simple abbreviation W2P has come to mean something other than the usual at X1 Print in Slough. The company’s sales and finance director Tim Lance stresses its difference in the market: it is not a commercial printer; it does design, print and fulfilment, with a number of contracts (60% of the business) that are based on pick and pack fulfilment.

From this springs its take on W2P as web to production, not web to print. ‘People talk about web to print and then think, that’s not really a print item. We can be producing printed and non-printed items from the same order,’ he explained.

A case in point is the work that X1 carries out for Boxglo – a slightly different twist on the personalised greeting card market, incorporating a small box of treats (chocolates, sweets, cupcakes) that fits through standard letter boxes. As well as personal events and celebrations such as birthdays, get well soons and thank yous, the personalised boxes also make a handy business or corporate gift. Orders can be personalised and placed through the www.boxglo.com website, and whirring away quietly in the background to help accomplish this is Infigo Software’s Catfish web to print system, which holds templates for the different box sizes, and allows users to edit text and pictures.

Orders come through to X1, where after the cut-off time individual orders are compiled into a single composite PDF file, step-and-repeated into a template based on the size of box ordered, imposed to fit two-to-view on a pre-die cut sheet, and printed on the company’s two Kodak Nexpress devices, one of which is equipped for Dimensional Printing. The box goes to picking and packing with a picture to show the staff what the infill needs to be.   

‘We take a flat sheet that’s pre-die cut, print on it, make up the box and send it out,’ said Mr Lance. ‘Boxglo has also developed this as a marketing item, with a box of chocolates and a tear-off discount voucher, all personalised, all 4-back-4, minimum order of one. We did a mailing of 6300 for a motor dealer recently, and we have six or seven other contracts where we are sending out print and non-print items.’  

X1 is also running an associated ‘web to production’ site that enables Mini dealerships to order Boxglo products as a thank you to customers. Mr Lance commented: ‘Someone said to me it’s a one-hit wonder, but it’s not – we are getting reorders from many customers. Two hundred thousand Minis are sold in the UK every year and if every one of those customers got a box to say thank you…and then there are all the other car manufacturers. There’s massive potential with these dealers.’

The business is starting to grow and Mr Lance said that in the week prior to speaking to Digital Printer, the company had produced and despatched around 11,000 boxes.

‘There’s a lot of B2B going on and Christmas is starting to come into play,’ he observed. ‘Boxglo are doing quite a lot of marketing as well. In a previous contract we were putting together O2 SIM card mailings, sometimes 50 to 60,000 a week, so we can absolutely handle these volumes, we have history in that. We can do a thousand a day without any issue whatsoever.’

It has been working with Catfish for two years now, and previously used a Kodak Insite StoreFront system for five years, making it something of a web to print veteran. There has been a steep learning curve with Catfish but it’s all working really well, he said. ‘We have got 40 customers on the web to production system, and three of them have their own customers on it.’

Whether you call it web to print or web to production, what is certain is that online ordering technology is going to play an increasingly important role within businesses such as X1. Of its print revenue, 20% comes from web to production, while 40% of its fulfilment revenue is gained through the technology. These proportions are growing. Mr Lance is certainly convinced about web ordering systems: ‘It is integral to the business; it’s part of the strategy; that’s where it’s going.’