For Printful, the future of retail is online and on-demand

Chris Ozols, Director of Business Development & Partnerships, Printful

Customer demand for personalised items has seen tremendous growth over the last several years, and starting an online business has never been easier. Combine personalisation and e-commerce, and you get an unprecedented boom of micro-brands.

Print-on-demand (POD) is helping retailers of all sizes adjust to this changing dynamic, and is leveling the playing field by empowering small businesses to compete with household names. One POD game-changer is Printful, a print-on-demand company with five global facilities, a team of over 700 people and more than 14 million products fulfilled to date.

Printful’s origins lie with Startup Vitamins, an online store selling inspirational merchandise for start-ups. With the designs catching on, the team was unable to keep up with the incoming orders. Unable to find a service that would take the weight of fulfillment off their shoulders, the Startup Vitamins founders started building Printful, a solution that would meet their quality, speed and automation needs.

The company has always valued technology and innovation, believing that virtually any aspect of running a business can be improved with a smart technical solution. Ten per cent of the Printful team are developers, constantly working on Printful’s custom-built software and creating integrations with industry-leading e-commerce giants such as Shopify. One of the features Printful is most proud of is its mockup generator. It allows users to design products with intuitive, easy-to-use tools, generate high-quality product images for free, and publish the products on their online storefront in minutes.

With Printful, online merchants have access to a one-of-a-kind user experience that saves time and money and gives freedom to experiment with their ability to sell online. There’s no need for upfront investments, building a supply chain from scratch, or taking the risk to stock up on products that may not sell. Orders are fulfilled on demand in state-of-the-art facilities and shipped worldwide without leaving a trace of the Printful name. The end-customer will never know that Printful made their product, unless the merchant they bought it from explicitly revealed it.

For the last six years, among Printful’s main strengths have been the quality of products it offers, its world-class customer support, the optimisation of the manufacturing process, and the diversity of e-commerce platforms it partners with. The company intends to stay true to this method and further its ambitions by expanding its fulfillment network and establishing its presence in international markets. Printful is already looking forward to the opening of its second Europe fulfillment center in Barcelona, Spain.

Looking five years ahead, Printful sees itself as becoming even more global and diverse. Apart from focusing on its core business of POD, Printful will also develop its warehousing and other e-commerce services to speed along its mission of helping entrepreneurs sell anything anywhere.

For more information, please visit the Printful website here.