Successful merchandising production with OKI Printing Solutions
11/01/2010
Personalised autograph cards and fan merchandising with web-to-print and print-on-demand solutions
THE CHALLENGE
Germany’s Merchandise & More Ltd. & Co. KG offers endusers access to a huge selection of personalised merchandise for fans of football or ice hockey clubs as well as mega events via its website www.ichbinderstar.de. To produce the merchandising items ordered via the website, Merchandise & More has implemented a professional colour printing solution for print-on-demand. With this solution, the company benefits from fast reaction time, high print quality on a multitude of media – at low maintenance costs.
THE SOLUTION
Merchandise & More installed OKI ES3640XF, a low-volume collateral and proofing printer in its offices in Cologne, Germany. First test runs using a variety of media formats from A6 via A3Nobi to A3 banner format allowed the production team to familiarise themselves quickly with the OKI Executive Series printer. It quickly became apparent, for which applications OKI’s colour printer was most appropriate. “We’d already tested several solutions for low volume collateral production, so it came as rather a surprise to us to see the quality of this toner-based system,” describes managing director Andreas Schmitz his first impression. “The high print quality and speed as well as the media flexibility were the reasons why we decide to try the colour printer for a selection of the web-to-print jobs coming out of out fan merchandise platform “Ich bin der Star!” – I am the star!
THE RESULTS
Personalised Fan Merchandising in Low Volume Print
www.ichbinderstar.de - as well as its French sister site www.cestmoilastar.com – provides a wealth of choice for the dedicated fan: Autograph cards, posters or decals for car windows of their favourite club, TV series or event. And everything can be personalised with their own name or message. The end-consumer can, for instance, choose a pre-formatted autograph card, insert a picture of their own choice and add any name, then order the required print volume. At the backend of the Internet
Branding Guidelines require colour proof printing
OKI’s colour printer needs to be able to hold its own in a largely automated – and profit oriented – process. Andreas Schmitz explains: “We need to be able to react quickly and flexibly to satisfy a large number of small print orders – as well as frequent short term increases in demand or a step-up in print volumes. To keep our customers happy, we are very much focused on fast service at consistently high quality.” Within the first two weeks, the team printed more than 5,000 pages (of EFI Laser Proof Paper XF130) of personalised A6 autograph cards, A3 posters and special format collateral. The result was enough to prove to the team that productivity would not be an issue with the printer, which has a capacity of 150,000 pages – with room to spare. In addition, the printer was able to convince in other areas as well. One of the decision making criteria was the colour fidelity of the output, as clubs and sponsors are understandably strict regarding the reproduction of their logos and house colours. Andreas Schmitz: “The OKI printer was exact in its colour fidelity and spot-on in the way it prints gradients, so we were in no doubt as to the value of the solution.”
An additional advantage of the OKI solution turned out to be the fact that, while the 5 bit module gave excellent results for premium prints and layout, the 1 bit module helped raise the quality of images where necessary. Schmitz: “The quality of the images the users upload via our websites is very often insufficient. In these cases OKI’s 1 bit output module has proven to deliver much improved results.”
Flexibility and fast turn-around times
How many orders come through via www.ichbinderstar.de very often depends on the success of individual events, which tend to vary significantly. In this context, Merchandise & More posed additional challenges for the OKI ES3640XF: Andreas Schmitz on further testing his team subjected the printer to: “The OKI colour printer proved to be an utterly reliable and very flexible product, which was easy to use and to maintain. Especially when compared to some digital printers, it got the low volume print jobs done faster and more flexibly.” When compared to outsourcing the printing, OKI’s solution helped optimise internal workflows, as it offered far greater control over the results. Not to forget the significantly lower costs for purchasing, maintenance and service of OKI’s printer versus the bigger digital machines.
Potential for additional web-to-print solutions
Merchandise & More were so convinced of OKI ES3640XF’s qualities as a web-to-print solution that they decided to present the solution during the 6th Merchandising Fair in Hamburg in January 2008. They gave trade visitors from various industries, associations and service providers an overview over what the OKI printer can do. Andreas Schmitz summarises the event: “As a specialist for printed merchandising we were curious to see if we were able to convince the trade visitors that web-to-print opens up a huge potential for us. The response was entirely positive and as a result we have been invited to participate in the German version of Pop Idol with a live printing session.”
Web-to-Print: Highly Automated Workflow
Merchandise & More developed a bespoke solution for the handling of its web-to-print processes, which is based on standard software. Key in the development was to create a fully automated process from ordering to payment and production of the merchandising material. The process consists of four major stages:
1. The users enter their data to personalise the merchandising items. The data is being sent to the servers via a PHP module, which scans and profiles them, checking for instance if attached images have the right size and resolution (min. 500KB, max 2MB). The data is then being written into the template of the respective item and a PDF is generated, which the customer can review only seconds after having entered and uploaded the details.
2. As soon as the customer approves the design of the item – including potential changes – the real ordering process is kicked off. Initially, a high resolution PDF is generated within the PHP module and saved to the server.
3. Parallel to this, all relevant customer data, including payment details are being saved to a databank and the payment is initiated. As soon as payment has been received, the PDF as it was saved to the server is being readied for printing. In addition, all documents needed for the shipment of the order are being printed and readied for completion of the order.
4. Only the assembly of the order and the sending of the shipment are not automated, but are being handled manually. The entire process is well documented and all data are being archived for potential future re-ordering. “The biggest challenge for us was to realise a fully and truly automated workflow. As we are currently dealing with more than 60 different items in our product range, the individual processing of all orders, including their fulfilment, would be time consuming and complex,” explains Schmitz. “To maintain profitability, we need to ensure a high degree of automisation in our processes. In addition, security concerns were an important part of our considerations. Whilst remaining strictly within the boundaries of the law, we also had to abide by our license holders’ directives. And as publishers, we also want to prevent any illegal or undesirable content – e.g. racist or pornographic material - to be created via our services.” To prevent such abuse from happening, Merchandise & More has developed a so-called bad-word filter to monitor the artwork created by the customers and block any infringements. As a checkpoint, the merchandising receives a visual scan as it is packed for shipping.
Andreas Schmitz is highly satisfied with the automated web-to-print process he has been able to set up at Merchandise & More and is already looking for additional applications for the service: “After web-to-print we are now looking into extending our services to mobile-to-print. Football fans for instance can send us a picture as it is taken during a game in the stadium – ordering their personalised fan collateral almost in real-time.”
ABOUT MERCHANDISE AND MORE LTD & CO. KG
Merchandise and More Ltd. & Co. KG, headquarters in Cologne, Germany and specialises in the production of personalised printed merchandise. As operators of the websites www.ichbinderstar.de and www.cestmoilastar.com the company offers users of the web-to-print processes a series of fan-autograph cards, window films, personalized stadium magazines or event posters for football clubs in the regional, secondary - and premier league as well as handball and ice hockey clubs since 2006. Also fan merchandise of TV programmes such as ‘I’m a Celebrity - Get me out of here' or 'TV Total Stock Car Crash Challenge' with Stefan Raab are included. With peak traffic of well over a million visits is www.ichbinderstar.de one of the largest web-to-print merchandising portals in Europe.
