The idea: Sell personalized invitations, books, and packaging products
Let’s look back at 2013 when the French printing company Imprimerie Messages SAS was among the top 5 online stores in France by total sales from their website for ordering invitations. At that time, web-to-print technology had already begun to penetrate the printing business.
The company decided to go with web-to-print by implementing an online editor on their website. To simplify the ordering process and receive more orders online for invitations of different occasions like birth announcements, weddings, and more.
About the Company
Imprimerie Messages SAS is a French printing company based in Toulouse with a 50-year history of experience in producing traditional books, made-to-measure packaging, and custom invitations. Guided by family values and a professional spirit, the company provides internal management at all stages of production.
After a while, Imprimerie Messages SAS also had a vision for two other brands:
- Launch an online editor in their bookstore and provide customers with the ability to personalize book covers and photo books.
- Run a web-to-print solution in a website for selling bespoke packaging products with a 3D preview feature.
The challenge: Find a solution applicable to the Microsoft framework
At first, the company attempted to use its technical resources and in-house developers to build its own online editor and launch it on its website.
We tried to develop our own custom design tool using Microsoft Silverlight, but we encountered difficulties along the way. Then we decided to find a solution that could be built on ASP.NET MVC because this is a familiar technology to us. Having studied various solutions on the Internet, we ended our search with Customer’s Canvas
The first project the company approached us with was an online store for selling custom invitations.
We’ve been using Customer’s Canvas since 2013, and we’ve been fully satisfied with the quality. Why think about competitors?
They decided to entrust us with two other projects.
Since the company serves French-speaking customers, all the widgets and design editor tools have been localized for their use case.
The solution: Design editors for three unique projects
In this chapter, we’ll take a look at three web-to-print solutions developed for Imprimerie Messages SAS online stores.
Web-to-print editor for selling custom invitations
A two-page editor was introduced for the invitation sales website. First, the end-user navigates to the online catalog and selects a template that the company has prepared in advance for different occasions like weddings, birth announcements, and religious celebrations.
Customers can also change the shape of the invitation’s edges to rounded or wavy during the editing stage. The price will automatically change to reflect their choices.
Users can also add photos from an integrated library of beautiful images.
Printing companies can compile photo collections themselves or use third-party solutions like Depositphotos.
Online-editor to personalize photo books
We have implemented a multi-page editor with a pre-designed layout for a website selling traditional books and photo books. Users can personalize each book spread by changing its layout or background, or even add some captions to better tell their story.
Photobooks may contain tens or even hundreds of pages, so it is extremely important that a web-to-print editor can process such a large amount of graphics. Customer’s Canvas is capable of handling such volumes of data.
Design tool for packaging products with 3D preview
Customer’s Canvas adapts to any product, including packaging personalization. We adhere to FEFCO and ECMA standards and support parametric models.
So, when Imprimerie Messages SAS approached us with a third project as a packaging provider, we were ready to meet their request. The editor for packaging was implemented with all the features necessary for creating unique designs, including text tools, an image library, snap lines, tools for creating QR codes, and much more.
Customers can design personalized packaging products right in their web browser, instantly visualize them in 3D, then export the final result to print-ready files.
The results: Simplified order acceptance system that processes more than 50% of orders
Imprimerie Messages SAS is an example of a company that uses web-to-print technology for several different products. Each of the editors has its own set of features adapted for the sale of invitations, packaging products, and books.
Customer’s Canvas is a well-packaged web-to-print solution that is distinguished by the quality of the work and constantly updated features. Web-to-print technology is essential for our company – 50% of our orders come from online stores, and more than 50% of customers use web-to-print to place orders
