Suffolk printer ASK Print is beta testing the new Catfish Mega Edit photobook module in preparation for a major launch into the photography sector.
Things cannot happen quickly enough for Gary Keens of ASK Print. The company has been in business for 25 years and has a good market in high end bespoke digital book printing. But Mr Keens has had a new idea that has redoubled his enthusiasm for the business and he has seen the software that will make that idea work; the only problem is that the software will still be in testing until the autumn.
The market he intends to target is photographers, and taking a booth recently at one of that sector’s biggest trade shows accrued some 800 solid contacts that saw the potential of the service ASK Print proposes and signed up for a trade account.
ISL’s Catfish web to print system forms the basis of Mr Keens’ plan, and specifically the Mega Edit dynamic editing module which is the subject of the ongoing beta test that ASK Print and some photographer customers are engaged in.
This year, ASK Print celebrates its 25th birthday, while Mr Keens reaches his 50th. The party to come will have a Monty Python theme, and there is a sense of fun and a little eccentricity to the company managing director. Speaking at the firm’s site, hidden away at the end of an unassuming residential road in Bury St Edmunds, and with his little dog Brian nestled at his feet, Mr Keens explained the plan to Digital Printer:
‘We are a bespoke, high end book printer and we do lots of school yearbooks, 30 to 100 copies. Once we established ourselves in that market, the market that next jumped out as requiring our services was the high end photographic layflat book printing market. It’s a market that seems to not have many players in it, and the ones that are in it seem to be quite complacent – they tell the photographers what they can do and they are quite highly priced.
Mega Edit will help ASK Print to target photographers with a range of products
‘I did some market research, asking photographers what they wanted, and gearing our service to that. That’s where the relationship with ISL came in. One piece of feedback was that the only half decent software out there currently was software upload, which is not very customisable and not very user friendly. I saw some demoes, saw ISL’s and we went down that route. They are developing some special software for the photographic market that will hopefully knock spots off the competitors’ products, and I know it went down really well at Ipex.’
Using the system, which ASK Print will white label for its customers, photographers can create areas for their customers to view pictures online and offer various photo gift products, including canvases, different sizes of photobooks, and DVD books, that they can easily create using the editing software, with the print order being fired straight through to ASK Print for swift fulfilment. The printing will be done on wide format HP systems or the company’s two Konica Minolta bizhub 8000s.
The great thing about the Mega Edit software, according to Mr Keens, is that it allows customers to build a photobook quickly. There is an auto-flow function that can populate pages instantly – the ‘boring bit’, said Mr Keens – giving them more time to play around with sizing and creative touches on each picture.
‘We cannot get this ready and working quickly enough,’ he continued, in reference to the 800 photographers waiting to use the system in earnest. ‘If it was ready tomorrow I would have a phenomenal amount of work going through it. We can white label our existing storefront, but I’ve decided not to roll it out until Mega Edit is ready. I am a stickler for quality and I know it will be better with Mega Edit.
In the meantime, ASK Print is offering free printed samples and a swatch of materials to photographers.
The target is to gain £1 million in revenue in the first year of offering the new service, with stiffer targets for the succeeding years. There is also a plan to develop a similar service for the funeral sector, where high quality and quick turnaround are necessities. Catfish allows printers to set up as many storefronts as they require.
Mr Keens said that in ISL he identified a company with a shared ethos. ‘I have never told my clients in any of my businesses what we do. I’ve always believed we should ask customers what they want us to do. With web to print we found that the other companies we approached said “this is how it comes” and we had to take it or leave it. With ISL, every single button is changeable. It is totally customisable by the customer.’
