New Tradeprint website opens up wide-format possibilities and more

Tradeprint has unveiled its new trading platform, which will enable it to expand its product paltform, including a planned increase in its wide-format offering.

Launched last week, the Dundee-headquartered trade printer's new website integrates with parent company Cimpress’ Mass Customisation Platform, which allows it to connect to its worldwide network of manufacturing plants and utilise the group’s full capabilities and add new products to its offering.

Its first new range was an extensive collection of roll labels with a variety of creative finishes. Soon to follow will be additions to Tradeprint’s wide-format offering, including flag printing, as well as long-term plans for expansions into garment and packaging printing.

“This new website is going to unlock an awful lot of power for us,” said managing director Simon Cooper. “It is a full top-to-bottom reinvention of our platform promising full integration with the Cimpress network.

“We have grown far beyond the size we started at, and long maintained the same online framework. That is perfectly fine for a £15m-turnover company, but we have our sights on £100m in the long term so wanted a website to support that ambition and identified that to do so would mean starting again and rebuilding our service.

“Now we have a framework that can evolve as the business grows. We can access all our data and rapidly add products to respond to customer demand and improve experience.”

Tradeprint has modified navigation on its new website to simplify the user experience and speed buying process – with returning customers now able to open the website, choose a product and checkout in less than a minute.

Currently exclusive to Tradeprint, the new framework, developed by enterprise CMS provider Magnolia and e-commerce specialist Commercetools, is expected to be rolled out across all Cimpress subsidiaries.

While the increased connectivity with Cimpress’ global production network helps increase Tradeprint’s own offering, the printer will not hurry to increase capabilities on its own pair of manufacturing plants in Dundee.

According to Cooper, “we have access to 48 HP Indigos across Cimpress – beyond that, it gives us one of the most extensive manufacturing capabilities in the world”. However, he did suggest that his own company would look at taking on a new digital printer “in the near term”.

Tradeprint currently turns over £14.5m and hopes to grow to its £100m target over the coming years through a combination of acquisitions and organic growth. It employs 165 staff, with six based in Mumbai, nine in London, and the rest evenly split between its Dundee plants.