When we started talking to print shops, we assumed the bottleneck was in production. It did not take long to realize the problem sat somewhere else entirely.

The machines are fast. The staff know their craft. The capacity is there.

The time disappears before the job ever reaches production.

A typical order often starts with an email where the customer tries to describe what they want. Someone at the print shop has to read it, interpret it and ask follow-up questions. What format? What paper? How large a run? When does it need to be delivered?

Then a price has to be calculated, a quote sent, the customer has to come back with an approval, and the order finally has to be entered by hand.

Suddenly it has taken five or six emails back and forth for an order the same customer may well have placed last quarter, with exactly the same specification.

And we have not even got to the print file yet.

Once the print file arrives, the next stretch of work begins.

The file is in RGB instead of CMYK. The bleed is missing. The images are too low resolution. The fonts are not embedded. The document is set up as A4 even though the finished product is 210 × 210 mm. There may even be a spot color in the document that the customer never ordered.

Someone at the print shop has to open the file, find the problems and explain them to the customer in terms they understand.

Then you wait.

A new file comes in and has to be checked again. Sometimes that one is wrong too, because the customer may be used to working with graphics without having the knowledge it takes to produce a correct print file.

This adds up to a lot of hours every week. And the work is often done by some of the most experienced people in the building.

It is time neither the customer nor the print shop really wants to pay for. And if an error still makes it all the way to production, the result can be a reprint the print shop has to cover.

Take a simple calculation.

A print shop handles 30 orders a week. Each order takes an average of 20 minutes of administration. At an internal hourly cost of SEK 550, that comes to roughly SEK 5,500 a week.

That is time spent administering orders instead of producing them.

The numbers will of course differ from one print shop to the next. The point is not the exact sum, but how quickly many small manual steps turn into a large cost.

Web-to-print platforms already exist. Several of them are genuinely capable.

We looked at the existing options before deciding to build Printlo. But we saw three problems in particular for the kind of Swedish print shops we work with.

The first is implementation.

With many systems it is not simply a matter of creating an account and getting started. Rolling it out becomes an IT project of its own, with configuration, integrations and technical expertise.

For a large print shop that can be reasonable. For a smaller one with maybe six employees, the reality looks different. There is rarely an in-house developer, or the room to run a substantial implementation project alongside daily production.

The second problem is the product range.

Many Swedish print shops work considerably more broadly than the name suggests. The same company might produce business cards in the morning, engrave door signs after lunch and print workwear in the afternoon.

Most existing platforms, on the other hand, are built primarily around traditional printed matter. When production moves beyond paper, the print shop usually has to fill the gap with other systems or manual workarounds.

The third is price.

Many of the established systems are built and priced for considerably larger volumes. For a large print shop the maths can be obvious. For a smaller one, the same investment can be hard to justify.

In the end we faced two options: recommend a solution we did not think fit the audience particularly well, or build something from the ground up for the reality we were seeing.

We chose the latter.

Printlo is an ordering platform built for print shops.

The idea is simple: the orders that can be standardized should also be simple to place.

The customer goes to the print shop’s own web address, picks a product and specification, sees their price, uploads their file and submits the order.

No quote has to be written by hand for a job that never needed a quote in the first place.

A key part of Printlo is the print file check.

When the customer uploads their file, it is inspected immediately. The system checks things like color mode, bleed, format and resolution. Anything that can safely be handled automatically is corrected on the spot. Anything that needs the customer’s attention is explained clearly while they are still placing the order.

That changes when the work happens.

Instead of the print shop’s staff discovering the problems once the order is already in, the customer gets help solving them before the order moves on to production.

The goal is straightforward: the file that reaches production should be ready to print.

Printlo also handles the rest of the order flow, including order status, history, customer details and the ability to reorder a previous job easily.

This is where it became clear to us why a platform for Swedish print shops has to think more broadly than traditional web-to-print.

A sign order, for instance, does not always start with a finished file.

The customer may only know that a sign is needed for a door, that it should be roughly 30 centimeters wide and carry two lines of text.

There is no finished PDF to upload.

Today that can mean the customer sends a rough sketch or a photo. Someone at the print shop then has to recreate the artwork at the correct scale before the sign can go on to the router, laser or cutting plotter.

That is why we are building a dedicated sign module.

The customer picks dimensions, material, color and number of holes, then places text or a symbol directly on the sign. The platform generates the artwork at the correct size and scale.

The idea is that the print shop gets usable production artwork straight away, instead of something that first has to be redrawn.

An order for branded clothing can look simple from the customer’s side, and get considerably more complicated by the time it reaches the print shop.

One and the same design might go on 40 garments in eight different sizes. Some need names. Others need different print placements. One person needs a medium, another an XL.

In many cases all of this is still handled through email and a spreadsheet.

Then the spreadsheet changes.

And changes again.

Before production can start, someone has to check that quantities, sizes, names, colors and placements actually add up.

In Printlo’s clothing module the idea is that the customer builds the order themselves. They pick the garment and color, place their print, set the size and fill in names where needed. The price updates as the order changes.

The print shop receives a structured order specification instead of a spreadsheet someone has to interpret.

Both the sign module and the clothing module are being built and tested right now, and are not yet in full operation. The sign module has come furthest.

But the fact that they exist at all is a large part of the thinking behind Printlo.

A Swedish print shop can sell business cards, door signs and workwear from the same operation. A system that only understands paper is not enough.

This is probably the most common objection we hear.

And to a degree it holds.

Every print shop has jobs that need to be handled personally. Unusual formats, particular finishing, larger public tenders, or customers who are not quite sure what they need themselves.

Those jobs should not be automated away.

If anything, that is where a print shop’s experience and craft create the most value.

The problem is that the same working method is used for the simple, recurring orders too.

Door signs for the same property company every time a tenant moves out.

Workwear with the same logo in the same position as last time, but with new sizes and names.

Roll-ups for the municipality’s trade fairs.

Decals for a vehicle fleet that has just added two new cars.

These are jobs the print shop has already produced many times over. The specifications are known. And still, the next order tends to start with yet another email.

It becomes particularly clear with customers on framework agreements.

A print shop with an agreement with a municipality, a property company or a larger organization can receive recurring orders for the same products from several different people. Even though the products are already defined, every new order goes through the same manual process.

That is exactly the kind of work we want to reduce.

Printlo is not meant to remove the quoting process.

It is meant to remove the quotes that never needed to be quotes in the first place.

That frees up the print shop’s time for the jobs where experience, advice and craft actually matter.

Printlo is currently being tested with a pilot customer in northern Sweden, a print shop with a broad range across paper, engraving and textiles.

Work on the sign and clothing modules continues alongside that.

We are starting to take on more print shops now, but at a deliberate pace.

The reason is simple. Printlo is not meant to be another system handed over with a username and a manual. We set the platform up together with the print shop.

Product range, prices, product options, rules and thresholds all need to reflect how that particular print shop actually works.

That work should be done properly once, so every order afterwards gets easier each time it comes back.

Do you run a print shop and recognize the email chains, the file problems and the recurring orders?

Then we think it is worth half an hour of your time.