Most Read
Most E-mailed
E-mail Article
Print Article
The Corporate Touch
Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Business Cards Tomorrow (BCT) has been in business for more than 30 years. According to Peter Posk, president of BCT, the firm has more than 80 printing plants throughout the United States and Canada, most of which are franchise-owned. "We manufacture more than 20,000 orders daily, and many of these jobs are turned around for the customers in 24 hours," says Mr. Posk. "We print business cards, letterheads, envelopes, announcements, and labels, and we manufacture rubber stamps."
For the first 24 years of its existence, Mr. Posk says, quick printers were BCT's dominant class of clientele. Today, however, he notes that the small office/home office customers that used to buy virtually all print products from companies like Sir Speedy, PIP, Insty-Prints, and so on, have more options available to them, including sign shops, mail box stores and office superstores. In fact, Mr. Posk points out, three of those office superstores are now large customers of BCT.
"About six years ago," Mr. Posk says, "we decided we should be selling business cards to corporate America, through resellers."
As a result, the company launched www.orderprinting.com.
Mr. Posk notes, "Basically, all corporations already have a corporate identity for their print products?layouts are the same for all employees. With orderprinting.com, each plant has the ability to create templates for accounts, on behalf of resellers, so that end-users can log onto a site and order their products." He claims that this approach has become so popular, orderprinting.com is "far and away the most widely used site for corporate print ordering in North America and presumably the world. Plants receive more than 4,000 orders through the site daily, and almost 50 percent of all Fortune 1000 companies use orderprinting.com."
Yet, he acknowledges, BCT is far from a household name among North American consumers. The reason, says Mr. Posk, is that the company always remains invisible to the end user. "The site is typically private-labeled with the end user's name or the reseller's name?never BCT. In fact, we even have online directions for technology companies that wish to place orderpinting.com sites behind their own site."
Mr. Posk adds, "We also have online preflighting software we developed called Perfectsend. We give our retail customers access to this site, and their customers can upload their own artwork and the site will preflight the file?if it is missing fonts, or contains low-res graphics, or is in an unacceptable file format, it will tell the users what the issues are while they are still there at the counter."
Two Common Complaints
Web Bindery LLC, founded by Peter Kassan in Manhattan, enables companies, such as printers and their clients, to provide high-quality printed versions of their online information to customers on an on-demand basis.
