Printing success with a three-point business strategy
Bangalore: In 2005, when Manish Sharma was looking to start out on his own, he was clear about three things—the business had to serve both the retail and corporate segments, have the benefits of scalable technology and cater to an underserved market. The result: Printo, a retail chain offering print and related services under one roof.
Printo Document Services Pvt. Ltd, of which Sharma is chief executive and co-founder, prints documents, business cards, brochures, manuals, presentation handouts, project reports, tickets, vouchers, certificates, posters and banners. Loosely modelled on Kinko’s, a US printing retail chain, Printo aims to move customers away from the unorganized print segment.
Focused: Printo CEO Manish Sharma at the firm’s Jayanagar outlet.
For the consumer segment, it offers printing on T-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, key chains, coasters, diaries, tiles, calendars, wedding cards, party invites and greeting cards.
Sharma, 36, says he has considerable traction among both business and retail consumers. “The challenge for us now is to achieve scalability and efficiency without any compromise on our quality of services,” he adds.
Besides regular print services, Printo offers a template bank that customers can rely on to customize a print order, saving printing time and cost.
Printo has 16 stores in Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and Mumbai (including on the premises of Infosys Technologies Ltd and Wipro Ltd) and plans to have 100 more outlets in two years. By 2013, Sharma says the chain will be 250-strong across India. Printo plans to utilize the Rs25 crore funding it raised from Sequoia Capital for expansion.
Pricing, says Printo’s CEO, is at par with the other mom-and-pop stores, as the start-up does not charge for product design. An order of, say, 100 visiting cards would cost Rs150 at Printo.
“We have come a long way from a day when one customer would visit our store. Now, we get about 1,000 customers at our 16 stores, and the conversion level is (as) high as 95%,” Sharma says.
Local printers make for able competition, says Sharma, but Printo is banking on its competitive prices, design templates, add-on services such as delivery for companies, to set it apart. Printo has a loyalty programme that offers customers a discount of 5% on a repeat purchase, for instance. Also, a customer can place an order in one city and ask for delivery in another city, where Printo has its outlets.
Printo plans to offer services such as courier delivery and stationery in the future. It currently has 230 employees and posted a turnover in excess of Rs5 crore in 2007. The firm sees revenue of at least Rs16 crore this year and expects to break even next month.