Rafferty also used the show to soft launch a new pan-European buying and selling portal for the print community, Marqetspace.
“It is live, in an embryonic way. We’ll be talking to the sector about it in the coming months,” Rafferty said. “Yes, this sort of thing has been tried before but we already have a group with something like 180,000 clients around Europe.
“Whether it’s colour print or more obscure printed products like printed condoms, or tennis balls – Marqetspace is a portal for these sorts of things.”
Transactions via Marqetspace are aimed at the trade and are direct between the buyer and seller, with Grafenia taking a commission on the sale. The firm’s W3P web-to-print system connects into it seamlessly, said Rafferty.
“You have to have W3P to be a seller,” he added. “I think this [Marqetspace] could achieve £10m-£20m of transactional value in the next three-to-five years.”
Grafenia also promoted its software-as-a-service (SaaS) web-to-print system W3P at the show, where Rafferty reported a number of visitors attended in order to benchmark the options from different suppliers.
“Because our system is simple to use and low-cost, we expect a minimum of 75 W3P orders off the back of the show,” he said.
Grafenia now has 350 users in the of the W3P webshop system in the UK, including Printing.com outlets, and more than 500 W3P users worldwide.
Rafferty’s book, Web2Print MD2MD, goes on sale via Amazon later this month, with a RRP of £19.95.
Before then, he is giving away a further batch of free books to the first 100 PrintWeek readers to email their details to book@w3p.com quoting “PW1” and including their name, company, address and postcode.
Tony Hodgson, director at digital printing consortium PODi Europe, described it as a “must-read” and “a highly practical guide.”
Grafenia is the £20.7m turnover parent company of print service providers Printing.com, Flyerzone and Drukland, alongside its growing software offerings.
