Micropress Printers bolsters W2P services

Micropress Printers is expanding its web-to-print offering with an additional B2C site.

The company is in the process of launching Skin Public, to offer customised phone and tablet covers. It launched its first B2C site, Grabmi, at the end of last year following the deployment of a new W2P platform.

“W2P is key for driving the digital side of our business and is clearly the way that the market is going,” said head of sales Rob Cross. “At the moment we are building our online presence. I expect it to take six months to a year to build up using social media.”

The firm invested £30,000 in a bespoke W2P platform, which replaces a previous off-the-shelf system.

“Any off-the-shelf system is limited,” said Cross. “We want to move more into B2C and off-the-shelf systems are much more configured for B2B. The beauty of our new system is that we can develop a site to sell any product, be it pens or catalogues. We just need a domain name and we can launch a new brand in a couple of days.”

Skin Public will use the firm’s Mimaki JV33 printer printing onto self-adhesive vinyl. Other digital kit includes Xerox DocuColor and Nuvera cut-sheet printers and an Epson Stylus Pro 9800, which produces print for Grabmi.

The firm’s next e-commerce step will be to relaunch its existing online ordering site Printing Made Easy on its new platform and to focus it on B2B customers. In due course, the firm is also looking to move its Think Ink site, which offers greetings cards and calendars to schools and artists, to the new platform.

Micropress is a £12m firm based in Reydon, Suffolk, with litho, digital print and publishing divisions.