Print Love: The Evolution to Intelligent Print Management
Print Love, based in York, UK, represents the evolution of print businesses in the modern era. With over 20 years in the print industry, founder Matt Taylor has built a comprehensive print services operation that serves design agencies, marketing teams, and direct clients with everything from simple banner stands to complex multi-process jobs requiring foil blocking, die cutting, and specialty finishing.
The company has weathered significant industry changes, including the pandemic that initially reduced their turnover dramatically from highs of £1.3 million. Rather than simply rebuilding the same business model, Taylor strategically repositioned Print Love to focus on delivering exceptional print solutions across their production network, maintaining their expertise in complex specialty products including custom dust jackets for enhanced book editions.
Today, Print Love operates as a lean, efficient team that leverages their extensive supplier relationships and production capabilities to remain competitive while maintaining the flexibility to scale without major capital investment. Their comprehensive approach to print services allows them to tackle diverse projects while focusing on what they do best: delivering quality results for their clients.
Key Results
printIQ delivered transformational results for Print Love, most notably enabling them to hire and successfully train a new team member to handle estimating within just six weeks. The implementation eliminated critical infrastructure vulnerabilities by moving away from their unreliable Windows server system, while maintaining pricing accuracy across their diverse product range. The intuitive system design means that 80% of quotes can now be handled efficiently without deep estimating expertise, fundamentally changing Print Love’s approach to scaling their workforce.
The Challenge
Print Love faced a critical staffing challenge that many small print businesses encounter: the need for experienced estimators in a specialised field where training traditionally takes years. As Taylor explains, “We obviously shrunk during the pandemic so to actually look at taking somebody else on at that point, realizing we need someone that’s experienced in what we were doing, or train someone up from scratch, we knew it would take quite a bit of time.”
Print Love’s previous MIS created additional barriers to bringing on new staff. Its quoting system only looked at the main quantity entered for production method selection, then applied that same method to all quantities, a limitation that often-produced inaccurate pricing. More critically, the system was complex enough that it would have required extensive training for any new employee to become productive.
“Estimating is the most important part of everything we do,” Taylor noted. “You can charge a job out too cheap, and you lose money on it. If someone calls for a job and your MIS produces an estimate that’s too expensive, then you don’t win that job and potentially might lose out on future business.”
The Solution
printIQ’s intuitive design philosophy proved to be the game-changer Print Love needed. Rather than requiring deep industry knowledge upfront, the system allows Taylor to build all his pricing logic and production knowledge into the backend, then present users with straightforward options.
“My thought is, if I can build everything into the back end how I’d want it to price it up, then people should be able to call up and 80% of the time, it can give them a price that’s going to be right,” Taylor explained.
The cloud-based nature of printIQ solved their infrastructure reliability issues completely, eliminating the server dependency that had created business-critical vulnerabilities.
This transformation fundamentally changed Print Love’s training approach. As Taylor explains to new team members, “printIQ allows us to concentrate more on training for product and material knowledge without the worry about estimating knowledge.” By taking a product-first approach to creating estimating logic in the backend, staff can focus on learning about products and customer needs rather than complex pricing calculations.
The system’s flexibility also supports Print Love’s diverse service offerings. Whether pricing simple print projects, or handling complex specialty jobs with multiple finishing processes, printIQ adapts to their varied requirements.
looking forward
Print Love continues to expand their printIQ implementation, with plans to move more products to the simplified estimating interface to make the system even more user-friendly. Taylor is also exploring additional integrations with their existing Enfocus Switch workflow system to further streamline operations.
The rapid success in training their new team member has the business looking forward to allowing more time for marketing activities and expanding the business further with more throughput and additional services. This breakthrough demonstrates how printIQ’s user-friendly interface can compress traditional learning curves from years to weeks, enabling small businesses to scale their operations without the traditional barriers of finding experienced estimators.
“It shows you what’s possible when you have the right tools,” Taylor concluded. “printIQ isn’t just software—it’s a way to transfer knowledge and make complex processes accessible to anyone willing to learn.”
