Southampton based marketing and display printer, InPrint, has partnered with leading builders merchant, Jewson, to develop an innovative web-to-print solution known as InBrand.
The InBrand online system, managed by InPrint, addresses the need for national retail or trade businesses to respond quickly and efficiently to local area markets, competitor pricing and local customer preferences.
Jewson’s local branch managers use InBrand to create bespoke point of sale (POS) materials to advertise products they know will appeal to their local customers.
Trialled first in Southampton, the system enables a branch to create new artwork in minutes, dramatically reducing design costs and increasing return on investment as messages can be more targeted and refined.
As the system is controlled at a national level, businesses can ensure all POS materials are on brand and follow its authorisation procedure. Print orders for materials are generated automatically and can be tracked easily online.
For businesses such as Jewson, multi branches can order bespoke materials independently yet still maintain brand integrity.
Within the first two months of the system going live, Jewson has created 6400 bespoke localised point-of-sale posters, and 77% of Jewson’s branches are actively using the new tool.
Nic Crowley, Marketing Manager of Jewson, helped conceive the idea and said: “We wanted to support all our branches with a tool to enable them to use their local knowledge to create promotions with local prices within their branch. The new POS system has been received really well by branches.”
Southampton Branch Manager for Jewson, Jason Eastland, trialled the system before it was rolled out in March. He said: “It’s user-friendly and we’ve seen a sales increase month on month since we’ve been using it.
“During the trial we were able to identify some improvements; one of my recommendations was to add the functionality to automatically calculate VAT as we thought it would be better for the system to work out the VAT to reduce human error.”
Gary Makin of InPrint comments: “We are always looking to expand our business through the development of innovative services. The launch of InBrand marks the start of another new venture for the company and helps us expand the opportunities to work with businesses on a national level.
“We have an obligation to all our employees to continually develop and grow, particularly within the current economic climate, and we hope that the resulting partnership with Jewson will create new job opportunities in the future.”
The InBrand template system can be created for any type of business sector, and since it’s been up and running with Jewson, further contracts have been secured and InPrint has received significant interest from businesses in the health and fitness and travel sectors.
The InBrand tool itself
The mechanism of the tool allows the look and feel to be controlled by a business’ central marketing team through a series of pre-designed templates, but the detailed content (price and product) to be controlled by designated employees at branch level.
The system has the flexibility to accommodate varying monthly print budgets to individual branches depending on their size and local set up. Once a template is completed, the number and sizes of prints are ordered depending on the requirements of a particular branch, only ordering what is needed thereby preventing print wastage.
The web-based tool can be accessed by any computer, which means no additional IT costs or complicated IT involvement.
The InBrand tool also offers bolt-on components such as an in-house blog, allowing branches to share best practise and sales successes.
See the InBrand demo available here: www.inbrandpod.com/inprint/haveago