“Still very busy,” answers Patrick Peters when asked how things are in the covid heyday at his Peters Amsterdam printing company and Printing Power. But that busyness comes from a small angle. “Where we normally serve about 300 clients, we are now working for mainly three clients.” Those are all three online entrepreneurs who are now thriving with sales of their products. Products they want to make an experience out of. That means beautiful packaging, a luxury card to go with it and plenty of work for the company where they were already doing the printing to their satisfaction. Patrick tells how things are going in Amsterdam in May 2020.
Client
Printing Power
since
2014
Techniques
WhiteLabelShop
At age 12 in the print shop
As the name of Print Company Peters probably suggests, this is the Peters family business. Patrick is the third generation in the company. As a young teenager he was already doing chores in the print shop and at age 12 he knew for sure: He wanted to work in the printing business! However, he had to be patient for a while. Smiling, “My mother thought it wiser for me to go to high school first. Then I did Graphic Management and Technology, but my interest always remained in the printing business.” It has now been 21 years since Patrick officially started in Print Company Peters. He started as a delivery driver of printed matter to customers. Soon he proved to have commercial genes, because after such a delivery he always came back with a new order. “What’s nice is that now we still have customers from then.”
No stress to press
Of course, those long-term clients are not entirely coincidental. For Patrick and his team of six colleagues, nothing is too much trouble. “People order from us because we make sure that everything is always delivered properly and cleanly. Occasionally things go wrong, but then we make a customer happy again by how we solve it. If an order comes in late from an external printing partner, I gladly drive back and forth to that supplier on the other side of the country to get it to the customer on time.” With that, Patrick immediately indicates their frequent collaboration with other graphic producers. “We want to deliver everything to the customer. We ourselves have offset and digital in-house, but I don’t stress about filling up the presses. Outsourcing is fine, as long as it serves the customer best.”
Online print as a shop window
That agile moving along with customer demand also led Patrick to look at online print at an early stage. Software developer Prindustry came into the picture as early as 2011 as a result, but Patrick was not satisfied with the web2print platform until 2014. “Printing Power was founded as a separate company with a webshop for ordering print products online. Online print is growing, but you can hardly compete with the big Internet printers. Not with standard printing. After a little market research, I found that I could also win customers online with our service. Printed matter is not only ordered, but also checked, corrected and formatted. This means that we now use Prindustry’s webshop mainly as a shop window with a large assortment of printed materials to attract customers. Most people call or email when they have a question.”
Breakdown to exhibition theme
In early 2020, Patrick set up a second online print shop. The focus: trade show supplies. The webshop with the logical domain name Beursbenodigdheden.nl offers all kinds of materials needed for the decoration of exhibitions. Consider banners, flags, canvases, frames, sheet materials or stickers. “In Printing Power’s webshop, I used to lump all the printed materials together. Now everything is organized in a separate webshop on one theme.” Exactly what this focus will bring, Patrick can’t quite figure out yet. The corona crisis quickly created a different reality in 2020 after the start of the new webshop.
Exploding Internet entrepreneurs in corona time
That same crisis is causing Patrick to face lost sales. “Like, unfortunately, no doubt many other companies with me. We are now running on a few clients who are actually growing tremendously. In all cases, these are online providers. For example, with our client Bloomon, you can buy flower subscriptions online. The demand for this service has now exploded. The entrepreneurs behind this want their product to be an experience. They pay a lot of attention to how they present the flowers to the end customers. For mailing, they use special packaging and include a nice card. These kinds of print productions are going very fast now. We also provide such products for an online organic supermarket. For example, they put coloring pages or stickers for the children in their packages. These kinds of start-ups are excited about special printing. They are being marketing-oriented to serve consumers.”
Moving along smoothly
In the new circumstances, Patrick moves flexibly. “Is there a mailing for a nursing home that needs to go out urgently? Then we make sure we get it done quickly. We keep going and hope for our clients and all other companies that more is possible soon!”
Want to know more about our software?
We would be happy to tell you more about Prindustry’s web2print software.
Our software experts will easily schedule an (online) appointment with you.
