▼A continued push for personalisation andonline ordering has rapidly evolved how print is sold to the customer also send email newsletters to their customers and offer a discount on their first purchase with a series of automated flows. A focus on sustainability is core to the creation of the company. Products sold on the Teemill platform are made from organic and recycled materials, printed using renewable energy, and designed to be remade when they’re worn out, as part of a circular economy. The company also manufactures its own line of blanks called ReSupply, with the aim of allowing for full traceability. Teemill operates alongside its sister apparel brand, Rapanui, under a unified parent tech company structure, with Rapanui first launched in 2010 as a sustainable consumer clothing brand. Realising that one small brand could not achieve their goal of fixing global fast fashion alone, they packaged their factory robotics, website software, and print-on-demand infrastructure into an open-access platform – this platform became Teemill. Describing the goal of the Teemill brand, content marketing manager, Sara Debreceni, says: “Our open-access platform allows for startups to do what we did in ten years, in ten minutes. Giving away this tech for free allows anyone, anywhere, to start selling their own products, made by default using sustainable practices, without the need to invest massive sums of money up front.” This core focus on sustainability also runs throughout the wider ecosystem set up by Teemill. For example, combining the stock required to run thousands of brands into a singular fulfilment system naturally benefits from economies of scale. Debreceni comments: “This, in turn, makes sustainable products more affordable for the consumer and means we can recover more material and remake it. Waste is massively reduced because we only make what people need when they need it and none of the brands using Teemill end up with excess stock. “When tools like Teemill centralise production and are made widely available through the internet, sustainable solutions can be scaled up quickly.” The Teemill platform, which is free to sign up to, also offers tools for SEO and email marketing and plugins to other popuAccording to a 2025 study by Gelato, 70% of printers believe that personalisation and customisation are driving customer preferences Factoid 45 www.printmonthly.co.uk Issue 361 - July | August ONLINE WEBSTORES | JONATHAN PERT lar sites such as Google, Etsy, and TikTok, all with the aim of making it easy to sell print-on-demand (POD) products online with no start-up costs. While Teemill has a similar focus to Flex4 on using customer feedback to develop its platform further, it also benefits from lessons learned by its sister brands. As Debreceni says: “Starting by building the Rapanui brand was a great way for us to learn how brands grow and what tools they need. To this day, our own brands help inform the development of the platform. We observe where our brand teams run into roadblocks or the processes that slow them down, like optimising products for SEO. Then, our engineers create solutions that speed up those processes and remove friction.” This alignment with its sister brand also allows new features to be tested in a B2C environment through A/B testing, with tools being refined in that space before rolling them out to the wider platform. As Debreceni says: “In this way, we know they’ll have a big impact for all stores and uplift the entire platform.” While the Teemill model may differ from Flex4 OPS, it solves many of the same issues, namely, to provide users with a streamlined, customised experience that simplifies the process from concept to finished print. Describing what the modern print customer is looking for, Debreceni says: “Customers want a frictionless shopping experience. Menus, landing pages, and collections should make it easy to find what they’re looking for. At the same time, the merchandising and design on the site must be consistent with the rest of the brand, to draw them into the brand’s world. If customers are new to a shop, they will be hunting for trust signals. This includes hints that the site is legitimate, such as quick loading time and a straightforward checkout.” Table for Two Ultimately, the growth of both Teemill and Flex4 OPS demonstrates that the online print market is not a monolith, but a diversifying ecosystem. The sector is currently balancing two distinct philosophies. On one path are the integrated platforms that bypass traditional manufacturing entirely by combining technology, eco-materials, and automated production under one roof. On the other path are the dedicated web-to-print software providers equipping established, asset-heavy commercial printers with the digital tools needed to protect and grow their market share. Rather than creating a ‘fight for dominance’, the future of the industry likely has room for both approaches. While automated fulfilment platforms excel at lowering the barrier to entry for creators and new brands, traditional commercial printers using advanced web-to-print software retain an edge in handling complex, high-volume corporate contracts and diverse substrate printing. Whether a business chooses to build a brand through a completely outsourced infrastructure or through digitising an existing factory floor, success in this next era of print will belong to those who best leverage these online workflows to meet the evolving demands of the modern buyer. Our open access platform allows for startups to do what we did in ten years, in ten minutes
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjM0NDIxOA==