ImagesMagUK_Digital-Edition_January2018

DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 20 images JANUARY 2018 The rapidly growing Inkthreadable owes its existence to an unexpected gift eight years ago A t the age of 14, Alex Cunliffe was given a heat press and sublimation printer from his parents. As presents go, it's up there at the more unusual end of the scale – now aged 22, Alex confides that to this day he still doesn't know what made them choose a printer as a present, but it was an inspired gift for someone from a family where running your own business is the norm. Alex and his partner Amy Dunn started using the kit to print T-shirts for their friends at school. "It wasn't about selling, we were starting to learn the industry, and getting to know the equipment and the products." The first design they ever printed on a T-shirt was a drawing that a friend did; they still have the T-shirt in a wardrobe at home. In 2013, when they had a few regular customers as well as selling T-shirts online, the pair decided to turn their hobby into a business. Now 17, they founded a limited company, Inkthreadable, bought a Polyprint Texjet direct-to-garment printer from Amaya and set up an e-commerce site. They soon picked up a few trade customers who were looking for a print- on-demand service, says Alex. "They had websites selling to the general public, but they didn't want to handle the printing and fulfilment side themselves. We had the means to be able to change the branding on the packaging and not put our names on that part when it was shipped out, so it was relatively easy for us to offer that alongside our own retail service." The orders were, however, handled entirely by email. "We would log into their systems to process their orders. It wasn't a scalable solution at all," explains Alex. "At the time we only had a handful of clients that operated that way, so it was manageable. It also made us realise there was no service at that time that allowed start-ups or small businesses to have a print-on-demand or fulfilment service." The next step was to put some money into improving the website so customers would be able to go on there and place their orders manually. It still wasn't, however, scalable, and the team knew that for larger clients, manually inputting each job wouldn't work for them. "But it worked for the size we were at that time," comments Alex. Scaling up Over the next two years, Alex and Amy added two more DTG printers, then towards the end of 2015, they reached what Alex calls the business's first turning point: they decided to eliminate entirely the B2C side of their business. "We saw an opportunity in the B2B side for fulfilment. That was where we wanted to put our focus. We made some software improvements to help internally in managing production, added more printers to be able to cope with the increased volumes and added a few extra products besides the T-shirts, like mugs, phone cases, canvas prints and posters." The strategy worked. "2016 was our biggest year of growth. We had three DTG printers at the beginning of the year; by the end of the year we had 11 and had increased our product catalogue to around 170 different products." They also partnered with a local company to completely rebuild their website and software from the ground up. This bespoke, future-proofed solution finally gave them the option to offer automated on-demand printing and fulfilment solutions for clients, allowing Inkthreadable to receive orders in real time – no input was needed from their clients . When Alex and Amy first identified the market in 2013, they didn't know of anyone else offering this service. "Since then, there have been other companies pop up, which is business, isn't it? I'd say that we're ahead of the game in terms of software and automated systems, The inkredibles We had three DTG printers at the beginning of the year; by the end of the year we had 11 [Above] Alex with the Kornit Storm Hexa – "hands down, the best investment the company has made”