PressUP announces it's time for change and aims at the platform
Immersed in the magical world of Candyland, on the occasion of the 10th year of activity, PressUP, the excellence of online printing services, presented the new corporate strategy with a European scope. But let's go in order, starting to explain this sudden passion for confectionery and cupcakes: "We wanted to communicate the change taking place and we chose to do it with a disruptive campaign, which surely stands out", says Vincenzo Cirimele - CEO and founder of PressUP. Against the backdrop of a dreamlike landscape, with glazed hills and flying candies, the claim calls for "Not accepting prints from strangers", but to make the right choice by focusing on the value of service, quality and advice. "In these ten years the web-to-print market has become a crowded place, with players who often focus on the prices and nomadic customers who only look at those". A process that is certainly not virtuous, which tends to minimize margins.
PressUP, a B2B tech company that looks to the future, proposes a new model dedicated to enhancing the printing market, starting from the assumption that printing is not in decline, as one might think, but represents a business with great potential, with an estimated value of 900 billion dollars (source: Smithers Pira, Statista, IFPI). "An opportunity that we are ready to seize by focusing on a platform model", explicits Cirimele. A concept that can be explained through examples of realities with which we interact daily. "While on the one hand the Pipeline creates value linearly, centralizing assets, production and staff, as a hotel chain can do with buildings and staff on all continents, on the other the Platform orchestrates the interactions between external producers and consumers, as Airbnb does, which today has zero properties in the world”, explains Cirimele. Two models that could respectively be compared to the world of traditionally managed print, with traits of craftsmanship, and to platforms that offer online services, such as PressUP.
"Surely the digital transformation is offering the opportunity to reorganize companies to create greater value", adds Cirimele. This, in PressUP, has resulted in the digitization of production processes, supply chain, product design and innovation, up to marketing strategies and sales. Everything, from quotations to the 4,000 daily shipments, is managed exclusively using digital tools. And if, as Cirimele remembers, a famous Chinese proverb states "The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago; the second best moment is now”, now it's time for PressUP to change. The model that the company is developing is the one that has already been started experimentally with the PressUP NOW pilot project which ensures delivery in the same day in some geographical areas of Italy. Easily achievable with some organization - it could be commented - if the service was limited to areas adjacent to the production site. But what if we wanted to extend it nationally and internationally? Cirimele's answer is: global sales, local printing. "PressUP has been investing for some time in creating a network of partners, both upstream and downstream, with concrete initiatives such as active involvement in international organizations of the caliber of Dscoop and Impriclub". In the first case, these are collaborations on the production front, which break down the barriers of shipping costs; in the second case we focus on the purchasing power of a group of companies - currently in France, Spain and Italy - which globally includes more than 3,000 employees and a total turnover of € 800M. This is reflected in an ever wider and updated catalog, which anticipates trends and responds to the demand for must-haves of the moment, such as aluminum water bottles, which have now become the object of desire so as to be difficult to find.
The enhancement of win-win partnerships for PressUP is the basis for the creation of a platform that is a common factor with selected partners able to overcome structural, geographical, storage and production capacity limits. A dream project? Rather a virtuous model, the result of the desire to do business by creating value. Even in the printing world.