Tangent launches personalised gift wrap service

Tangent Communications has invested in three HP Latex 360 printers to support the launch of its latest web-to-print venture, the personalised gift wrap website Wrap.me.

Wrap.me prints personalised gift wrap using photos taken from the user's computer, phone, Instagram or Facebook account, which are arranged in a tile pattern on the wrapping paper.

Prices (including post & packaging) range from £4.99 for a 650x450mm sheet, to £9.99 for a 650x1,800mm roll and £14.99 for a 650x3,000mm roll.

The site, which launched on Monday (24 November) following a one-week beta, joins Tangent's existing web-to-print brands – Printed.com and Goodprint – and adds a new B2C string to the group's Online division.

Tangent director and Printed.com founder Nicholas Green said that the idea for Wrap.me had come out of a conversation with the firm's new social media agency Byte and had led to the development of a new software platform that Tangent's other online brands will transition to in 2015.

"Our whole strategy for 2015 from a tech development point of view is to look at ways to increase the speed with which we can bring an idea to life," said Green. "We designed and built a new platform for Wrap.me and that will be the cornerstone of our Tangent platform for 2015.

"There's a huge difference in the technical infrastructure behind Wrap.me and Printed.com but the way we've approached the construction of this new platform is to remove all elements of hard coding and to break the site down into layers [of functionality].

"So we will have a single platform and we can use application programming interfaces (APIs) to bring certain components into one website versus another. It's much more flexible and allows us to implement new ideas much faster; Wrap.me is an entire new brand and business that we brought live to market within five weeks."

Green added that the finer details of the migration of Printed.com and Goodprint to the new platform had yet to be worked out, but that it would "definitely happen in the first half of 2015".

He added: "We've only scratched the surface with Wrap.me and the opportunity to expand the service is quite significant. We've already taken a good few hundred orders and people are talking about it online. I've never been part of something before where everyone is talking about it and saying how much they love the product, it's very exciting."

Green said that three new HP Latex printers, which have been installed alongside an existing HP Latex LX600 and three HP Latex L26500 printers at Tangent's Northumberland production facility, had been bought to provide additional capacity for the Wrap.me launch.