The printing industry is worth US$25 billion in Southeast Asia alone. PHOTO: GOGOPRINT
Yet Gogoprint, a startup based in Thailand, believes that printing is here to stay – there are still use cases for, say, business cards, flyers, or leaflets. It estimates the market is worth US$25 billion in Southeast Asia alone.
“It is still a massive industry, and there has been so little progress during the last decades that we believe it is really ready for disruption,” says Gogoprint co-founder Alexander Suess.
So the company thought of a solution to breathe new life into printing businesses.
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On its website, customers choose what they want printed and select the paper, format, and colors they would like to print with. They can upload their artwork file and Gogoprint prints and delivers it to their offices or homes.
While things are pretty easy on the consumer-facing side, they’re a bit more complex in the backend.
Gogoprint uses algorithms to look at many parameters such as paper, quantity, and delivery times and aggregates those orders into a “print-run” or a batch of prints. That way, it maximizes the space on each print sheet.
The result is a faster, cheaper process for consumers.
“Every print-run has considerable fixed costs,” says Alex. “With every additional order, we reach high economies of scale, as we can aggregate orders more efficiently. We pass those cost-savings onto our customers, and have reduced our prices a couple of times already since our launch in November 2015.”
Gogoprint’s revenue model is simple: people pay the company to print stuff for them. However, it doesn’t own the printers – it only buys capacities from selected printing partners.
Alex says Gogoprint is capable of printing orders in at least 24 hours – way faster than traditional printing houses, which take seven to 10 days.
Lightbulb moment
Alex and his co-founder David Berghaeuser have been doing business in Thailand for a couple of years now. They got the idea of online printing from mature markets in the west. Vistaprint from the US and Unitedprint from Germany, where David and Alex are from, are two companies doing the same thing.
“What always struck me was how expensive printing in Thailand is. You would think that prices are cheaper than back in Germany, as paper and plates are imported from close-by China and labor costs are much lower over here.”
After discussing the business model with multiple industry experts and doing extensive research about prices and costs in the market, the duo was confident they were onto something.
“It was a bit like being able to see the future, as we knew how online printers changed the printing landscape back in Europe,” shares Alex.
“The early launch of the website and the order numbers of the first couple of months proved us right.”
Expanding to Southeast Asia
Gogoprint targets mainly small and medium businesses in sectors like education, entertainment, healthcare, hospitality, travel, transportation, food and beverage, retail and manufacturing – which are often underserved by traditional printers. That’s because this segment prints lower quantities and less frequently than corporates, notes Alex. But the company also has large clients such as Honda, the Thai stock exchange, Lazada, and Siemens.
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Alex declines to disclose the company’s revenue and order numbers, but he says both are growing by approximately 30 per cent month-on-month.
“We are currently developing some additional revenue streams, such as offering design services and also distribution of the printed products,” he adds.
Over time, Gogoprint will also optimize the process of preparing customer artwork files for printing, which the company has already automated. Especially in emerging countries, customers tend to send all types of files such as Excel or PowerPoint presentations, which cannot be processed by printing machinery. Traditional printers manually convert those files into a printable format, which delays the printing process.
Gogoprint earlier raised a “mid-six figure USD” round of funding from OPG (Online Printing Group), an investment firm managed by Kai Hagenbuch, former investor of Brazil-based Printi.
“The investment will be mainly spent on market expansion, marketing, customer service, and website development,” Alex shares.
From Thailand, Gogoprint launched in Malaysia in October and is looking at a couple of other markets in Southeast Asia. “We chose Malaysia for its sizeable printing industry and [because] ecommerce is already advanced.”
This article originally appeared on Tech in Asia.
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