VB Media expands geographic offering with We Do Printing
Pictured: Cian Byrne, Managing Director of We Do Printing
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, We Do Printing continued to diversify, expanding into event management and music events more broadly as well as producing business cards and flyers for corporate customers. The company’s customer base today includes many of those same customers the company first started working with two decades ago, a testament to the kind of customer relationships it builds.
Today, We Do Printing is made up of five full time staff members operating out of 2,500sq ft premises in a small village called Kilcoole in County Wicklow, Ireland. Being located just 35 minutes south of Dublin, the company is well placed to serve the city whilst having the pleasure of being based in the ‘Garden of Ireland’. Over the past three years, business has grown around 20 percent year on year, and the company’s typical customers are in the events, hospitality, music, and TV industries, the latter being a new growth area for the company.
“It started during Covid because a lot of productions are made near here,” explains Cian Byrne, Managing Director of We Do Printing, adding: “At one moment, we could be printing pallets of money for a heist movie, but then we also have a mix of customers from the local plumber or bakery down the road to somebody we dealt with years ago that now has a solicitors firm. So there’s still that mix of small businesses, but events, hospitality, and music are our main growth areas.” One memorable job for Cian was for a Gordon Ramsay TV show called ‘Next Level Chef’ produced by Fox which involved a 25-day shoot where We Do Printing produced labels for the products featured on the show. Another was the printing of packaging for the cereal brand Kellogg’s for the relaunch of some of its cereals from the ‘80s.
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. According to Cian, the small-format work has always “ticked along at its own rate”, but the large-format products are where the demand is booming with customers increasingly looking for something different.
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. With no product information on it, the site acted as a portfolio demonstrating examples of work with the aim of encouraging potential customers to get in touch. Having designed websites himself, Cian was familiar with the pitfalls that people can fall into, such as building a site and expecting overnight success. “I was wary of going up against the likes of Vistaprint and Printing.com and 5,000 other print websites out there,” Cian explains. However, whilst working with The Online Print Coach, Colin Sinclair McDermott, through his Print Mastermind community, Cian explored the benefits of investing in a web-to-print site for We Do Printing and in November 2022, he got in touch with VB Media on Colin’s recommendation.
VB Media is an e-commerce platform for the print industry, designed to help businesses establish an online presence without a hefty price tag. Trusted by hundreds of print companies, VB Media serves printers, designers, and copy-shops across the UK and Ireland, enabling users to create B2B, B2C, trade sites, and private storefronts, all seamlessly integrated without relying on third-party plugins.
When We Do Printing got in touch with VB Media, there was just one problem. VB Media didn’t offer a euro version of the site at the time, only a sterling version. However, VB Media immediately set about creating a euro site and by April 2023, the team had developed and launched a site especially for We Do Printing. During the initial six-month launch period, VB Media experienced a number of areas of the site that required tweaking such as renaming ‘Postcode’ to ‘Eircode’, courier and delivery differences, and tweaks to cater for different VAT rates in Ireland compared to the UK.
A tailored VB Media site for a new location
Reflecting on this initial setup process, 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 it was business as usual, because 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.”
VB Media offers three levels: Lite, Standard, and Pro. Initially, We Do Printing opted for the middle tier due to the ability to add custom products, but the company later went on to upgrade to the Pro level following an integration with Printlogic MIS software. 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 available such as Tradeprint or Solopress.
“We just started trying to build a product a month or every couple of weeks, and just added on to the most popular items,” Cian explains, adding: “We added business cards and letterheads, but then we thought ‘every printing company in the country offers business cards, so how are we going to be number one or top three in Google search?’, so we started building out more niche products for the future roadmap of the company.” Now, every time We Do Printing adds a new product onto the website, it ranks on Google. “We put a lifesize cardboard cutout page up and ten days later we’d had three orders. So it paid for itself,” Cian says.
Reflecting on the process of getting the VB Media site up and running, Cian says: “It was very quick and it was really easy. 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. A lot of the time I was either rewriting content or resizing images or creating new images of banners, for example, and once we got the look and feel finalised, it was really 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.”
Streamlining sales and boosting customer experience
The biggest benefit that We Do Printing has experienced since launching its VB Media site is the ability to streamline sales through the time saved in administration and customer service. Instead of customers searching through the website for examples and then calling or emailing to ask questions, everything is now streamlined in one place via the website with information on products, pricing, sizes, and more all at the customers’ fingertips. The ability to place orders directly via the website also removes the risk of errors when entering data and makes the ordering process simple and straightforward for the customer.
“All the information is there,” Cian says, adding: “They can place an order online. We don’t have to call them to get payments. We don’t have to call them to check their eircode. The site does it all for you, so you just get an email to say ‘print 500 business cards’, and the payment is already done, the admin is done, the invoice is sent. It just speeds up the process here on smaller orders and that’s what I want. I want smaller orders coming in that are 90 percent dealt with, and the only bit you have to do is print it, put it in a box and send it out.”
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.”
Prior to investing in the VB Media site, no orders were being made through We Do Printing’s website. Today, this has grown to 7% of orders with the company currently averaging an order per day. “One of the things that I did was, when I was writing the site, I put products up without pricing on them, so you couldn’t order them online, but now I am going back and putting them in to get the pages up ranking on Google. That’s growing almost daily,” Cian explains.
Capitalising on promoting niche 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.”
Time and effort is crucial for success
Something that’s often overlooked by businesses investing in web-to-print sites is the importance of investing the necessary time and effort into updating them regularly. It’s not a case of setting up a site and expecting the orders to roll in, as Cian has demonstrated through his continuous additions such as updated product descriptions, images, and general information.
On this, 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.”
Cian continues: “Do your own work. It’s easy to do a pre-written product description and image, but so does everyone else. Customers notice the boilerplate language and so does Google, so you’re not going to rank. I get a bit of a thrill when you write something and a week later you get an order, or when you look at Google and it’s Vistaprint at number two and you’re at number one.”
