PRINTADA! PROFILE
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hasn’t seen offered elsewhere; after the first 12 months the customer can cancel the subscription with no penalties. “They just give us three months’ notice, and as long as they return the printer to us, they can cancel the subscription,” he says. “So if the circumstances of the business change or they just find themselves not using the printer, they can give it back; they’re not tied into a deal for a full three or even five years. It’s flexible and clear.” The subscription agreement is also simple – just two pages in length. “There’s no finance arrangement or leasing or anything like that,” Paul says. “It’s a rental subscription and it just takes a couple of minutes to fill in so the customer can do it themselves or the dealer can do it with them.” Positive response Printada! launched its Beta version in January and started taking orders in February. So far, the response has been very positive from customers and dealers, according to Paul. “Once we’ve sat down and shared the details with people, the response has been very strong from dealers and it seems to be for lots of reasons,” he says. “The copier dealers seem to like it because it gives them a way to effectively place A4 devices without having to do any work, and it doesn’t take them away from their core A3 and office products focus. IT dealers pay like it because they can’t make much money with A4 now. They might sell the printer, make £10-20 from that, probably never sell the cartridges again, whereas with this every month they’re gaining revenue from that customer for three years. But at the same time, customers still saving money.” Printada!’s solution is also geared towards SMEs that have home or hybrid workers, Paul adds. “During the pandemic, one of the things that was difficult for companies was having their employees suddenly working at home, all using different types of printers. And most of them weren’t geared up for business printing. Some people were making huge expense claims for inkjet cartridges for printers, which weren’t suitable, and they were phoning into their IT managers for help and with various types of printers, the poor IT managers didn’t stand a chance of being able to help. “Printada! offers a perfect solution because it means employers can have exactly the same device in all employees’ homes and we do all the warranty and maintenance for it. But
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Some people were making huge expense claims for inkjet cartridges for printers, which weren’t suitable, and they were phoning into their IT managers for help and with various types of printers, the poor IT managers didn’t stand a chance of being able to help.
even if the IT department do want to become involved, it’s just one device that takes the same cartridges, which are delivered automatically.” Big ambitions Now Printada! is starting to get traction in the marketplace, Paul has big ambitions for the brand, which is owned and operated by Data Direct Thames Valley Ltd. “There are many, many organisations within the SME space that want to buy their printers and just go down that traditional route. But if we could even just get three quarters of 1% of the market, that would be a huge number of devices and it would be a huge number of customers that we’d be helping to make life a little bit easier for and save them some money as well. “We’ve tried to keep it simple; we just have 12 deals, four devices, three different page levels. As the dealers have gone out and spent more time with their customers, we are getting now some more specific requests where the dealers come back saying, ‘our customer likes a certain brand, is it possible we can put something together using those? Or they don’t want 5,000 pages per month, they need to do 7,000 so we can do that?’ If dealers need additional support to create a bespoke deal, we can do and are doing that and that’s working very well. “But the idea really is to make it as much as possible self-serve: dealers can pick one of the 12 deals and introduce it, or customers can just choose a deal and sign up. It is quick, hands off and easy for everybody, but we can go bespoke if people ask us to.”
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