VB Media worked with Irish company We Do Printing to create a web-to-print site for the Euro currency market
Founded in 2007, We Do Printing started out by designing flyers and posters for club nights and events. After purchasing its first printer 12 years ago to print the flyers and posters it was designing, they diversified into other streams. Based in Kilcoole, County Wicklow, Ireland means the business is located just 35 minutes south of Dublin and is well placed to serve the city. Over the past three years, business has grown around 20 percent year on year, and the company’s typical customers are now in the events, hospitality, music, and TV industries, the latter being a new growth area for the company.
Having purchased a flatbed printer in February 2024, We Do Printing has experienced huge growth in the production of boards and flat signage such as indoor totems and point of sale, with this area of the market really having taken off for the business.
Time to invest in a web-to-print solution
We Do Printing started out with a single-page website in 2007 and built a WordPress site a few years later which acted as a portfolio, demonstrating examples of work with the aim of encouraging potential customers to get in touch. Having designed websites himself, Cian Byrne, Managing Director was familiar with the pitfalls of building a new site. However, whilst working with The Online Print Coach, Colin Sinclair McDermott, Cian explored the benefits of investing in a web-to-print site and got in touch with VB Media on Colin’s recommendation.
VB Media is an e-commerce platform serving printers, designers, and copy-shops across the UK to create B2B, B2C, trade sites, and private storefronts, all integrated without relying on third-party plugins.
When We Do Printing got in touch with VB Media, there was just one problem. VB Media only offered a sterling version so immediately set about creating a euro site. By April 2023, the team had developed and launched a site especially for We Do Printing.
Gavin De Boos, director of VB Media, says: “Because we didn’t have any currency other than pound sterling at the time, it was definitely a challenge and there was a little bit of work needed for that, but we wanted to expand geographically, and Cian was happy to be the guinea pig. The VAT rate was probably the most challenging because we had to research how this differs across different geographic areas, and we tweaked underneath the hood a lot more than we’d originally anticipated. But that’s what we do! These things happen all the time when you’re developing a product and because we’re quite a small and agile team, it could have been a lot more challenging than it was, but it was certainly a learning curve for us.”
Cian adds: “In those couple of months we changed a few things, but it was great – I’d just email the guys and they’d say ‘that will be done by Friday’, and it’d be done by Friday. They’re on the ball.”
We Do Printing started out by moving its ‘brochure-style’ site over to the VB Media site which featured around ten pages, and from there the team began populating the site with products. Whilst VB Media does offer pre-loaded templates, We Do Printing opted to build the site from scratch as it wasn’t linking to any of the connected suppliers.
Reflecting on the process of getting the VB Media site up and running, Cian says: “The way they’ve built the backend, you don’t have to go into every page and set up individual settings for what colour you want something to be or what font you want. It’s all done on one master dashboard, and you do it once and it applies to all your pages. Once we got the look and feel finalised, it was easy and quick. Even today, if I notice that a font doesn’t look dark enough, I can change it once and within seconds it’s changed across the board.”
A challenge for We Do Printing prior to investing in a web-to-print site was that customers didn’t grasp the breadth of products the company offers, Cian explains: “I’d talk to a customer and they’d say “I got a roll of stickers from another site’, and I’d say, ‘well, why didn’t you get a roll of stickers from us?’, and they’d tell me they knew we could do it on sheets but not on rolls. Now there’s no excuse, it’s there in front of you on our website.”
Capitalising on promoting custom products
Reflecting on what it is that makes We Do Printing’s VB Media site so successful, Gavin says: “One of our USPs is the supplier integration, but at the time we didn’t have suppliers in Ireland or it was too expensive to ship, so one of the features that Cian used more than our average customer was custom products – the ability to add products from scratch that aren’t tied to a supplier in any way.”
The importance of customer experience is also evident in We Do Printing’s success, with the web-to-print site by no means replacing this human interaction. Cian says: “A lot of the time, people still like their hand held through it so they see all the details on the site, everything is answered, but they still want you to just write them back an email or talk to them on the phone.”
The voice of experience
Cian offers some words of advice for any businesses thinking about investing in a web-to-print site: “It’s not something you do on day one and then you walk away and leave it. Unless you have a catalogue of products that you’ve built in the past with an older system, or you have someone dedicated who can just sit there and write out content all day – if you wait until everything’s perfect, it’ll never be launched. You don’t have to have everything ready on launch day.”