printed.com founder Nick Green talks about what inspired him to set up the printing services company, how he tackles customer relations, and what he sees happening in the future.

Conversation:

Tell me about printed.com – what does it do ?

Printed.com was founded in 2011. Our aim is really to make it the single largest biggest destination in the UK for buying online print and print related products.

Now if I’m wanting to specifically buy something from printed.com what’s available what can I get?

Well as a starting point we have the traditional products you would expect to find at a site like ours, like business cards, leaflets, flyers and stationery. But we also have slightly more diverse products, like an entire section focused on wedding stationery and also now photography.

So that’s what you’re selling, what about your unique reward program, what is it and what is it designed to do?

I think that the starting point really was to give something back to our customers, but what we’re also doing is differentiating printed.com from pretty well much every single other site in the market that does what we do. So today for every pound you spend you get printed points and you can use those points in our reward partner room. We have British Airways with Avios points. We have Amazon with their huge collection of products. We have M&S, and recently joined us is i-stock providing amazing access to beautiful images for all of our customers. So today you use printed.com, you gain points, and you use those points for whatever products you would like.

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So those are your partners in your reward program. Tell me about who buys from you, who comes to you, what type of business? Big, small, medium?

Well our customers really come from all walks of life but most of them tend to be small businesses. So we have a lot of designers, about 45 per cent of our customers every week, tend to be either designers or creative businesses. We then have a strong presence in the retail space, so small retailers, they might be hairdressers, they might be bars, they might be restaurants, they might be gyms. We have a growing volume of charities as well using us to help all their work. So it tends to be small businesses.

Now, obviously you are successful, and you’re aiming to be more successful in the future, but let’s talk about the present.

Well, a quarter our business has always been putting the customer first. When we first set up printed.com we put in place a great big customer services team. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for customers that were having any challenges to be helped. We have the printed.com promise, which basically says to all of our customers if you’re unhappy with your experience, we will either offer you a full refund or we will simply reprint the job. Our goal there is to continue getting more and more repeat business. So if there is a problem we want to confront it, we want to deal with it, we have a great customer services team, they’re online there to help people all the time.

So you’ve got the customers you’ve got support and partners with the reward program you’re differentiating yourself, are you going to sit back and rest on your laurels or are you going to take this further in the future? My question there is, where are you going from here?

We’re really excited about the future. We’ve seen amazing growth within our business, and for me what that shows is that we’re offering something that people want. I think internet shopping has still got a huge way to go in the UK, in particular for what we do. So over the next three to six months we’re working on some really exciting initiatives, beginning for us to being in the photo related market – that’s going to open up a huge spectrum of opportunity for us. International is calling. You know, potentially even cloud-based products are going to come over our horizon. So for me, I think the future is just expanding and growing the platform we already have and selling more to our existing customers.