Photographs help us to hold onto some of our most precious recollections. Touchnote is an online and mobile service that harnesses print to make those memories last forever.

That mobile and print could have a close or even mutually dependent relationship was probably not obvious to the pioneers and protagonists of the flourishing digital channel, but at Touchnote the two types of media fit hand in glove.

Touchnote is not a printer, but its business could not exist without print. It is an online postcard and greetings card service that accrues more than 90% of its orders through a mobile app that has been downloaded some five million times. The product is very simple. Customers simply upload a photograph, and that becomes the image for the card which they can send to chosen friends and family. There is an element of templating for greetings cards, in terms of choosing the right wording for the occasion, but basically the uploaded photo is the hero of the piece. Orders are printed by HP Indigo-equipped print suppliers in Guernsey, the US and Australia, for delivery around the world.

‘Mobile and print can fit together very well,’ said Touchnote’s Raam Thakrar at the company’s London office. ‘Digital print is still under-exploited. We have done a lot of research, asking consumers what they value most in their lives, and it’s very rare that they say something digital. It’s an experience and the physical thing that reminds them of it. We spend a lot of time analysing the types of cards that people send and it is overwhelmingly very normal things. Life’s normal events made somewhat permanent. All these photos mean something to people and they don’t even have to be particularly good technically.’

When dealing with people’s cherished memories, there can be no compromise on quality, and having looked at all the printing systems on the market, Touchnote decided that HP Indigo was able to deliver the quality that customers demanded. The Guernsey print site uses an HP Indigo 5600 press, but this is just a detail really. ‘We need to understand and master the technical side of print but our success will not rest on whether it’s an HP Indigo 5600, 7600 or 10000 press. It will lie in helping our customers share their emotive memories,’ Mr Thakrar observed.

‘We print out of the US, the UK and Australia, and we print and mail within one working day from all those areas. With all respect for the print industry, it’s a good time to demand services from them. They can do a lot for you and we are in a strong position.’

He said that while Touchnote is a demanding client, it is ‘reasonably generous’ too. It will push on price but not too hard.

‘We need to work with people that are bright, who can come up with ideas that we can’t, and that are totally dependable. The only way to be successful is to be absolutely at the top of our game. As consumers, we don’t suffer fools at all. The damage to reputation of getting some cards printed wrong is too great. So we need to know that they are on top of what we need them to do – the stock, the finishing, print quality, lamination. 

‘We will push on price but we will not squeeze.  Goodwill has to remain; we want our printers to work with us and enjoy it because that’s the only way that we will get to the final stage of sending tens of millions of these cards a year. Someone will do that and there’s a chance it will be us.’

Building the business up to that stage will require Touchnote to become an essential part of how many people communicate in their lives – a task that will doubtless be as difficult as it sounds. With around five million downloads of the mobile app, written in-house as is all the company’s software, it has certainly set off strongly along that path. Getting people to come back again and again is the challenge.

‘We have this abundance of photos, many of which are very important emotionally and are technically good enough, and if we don’t do anything with them they just fade,’ said Mr Thakrar. ‘Even if a photo is out of focus it can be a fond memory. Touchnote is the tool that you can use to share the most important events in your life with the people you care most about.’

It is also a tool for tapping into the enduring power of print.