Personalised gifts are a great option for those looking to get a gift that is both unique and holds a special meaning to the recipients. After all, the best gifts are the ones that are thoughtful and has a certain amount of effort put into them. Printcious.com, a startup launched in early October is the perfect avenue to create personalised gifts for your loved ones.
It’s Not Rocket Science
Printcious.com which stands for Printing of Your Precious Gifts, is a B2C online platform for customers to customise their DIY gifts with their very own design, picture or text.
Creating the gift is a fairly simple process through the site, and it is much like heading to a Subway store to purchase a foot long sandwich. This is because the site first requires its users to select a base of either a t-shirt, mug, cushion or ceramic tile.
In the next step, a colour or size should be chosen for the gift, after which users can express their own creativity with images or words emblazoned across the gift. Alternatively, if customers wish to purchase ready-made designs of items on the site, they are able to do so as well. There are after all numerous categories to choose from including fitness, love and even startups.
A Sizzling Process
In order to create these gifts, Printcious.com utilises the technology involving heat transfer printing. Vincent Tong, Marketing Director of Printcious.com shared with Vulcan Post that the process involves 3 key components which should be placed in consideration. These are: the amount of time that heat is applied to the gift item, the optimal degree of temperature by which the design will adhere to the item and lastly, the amount of pressure required when heat is applied to the gifts.
“In the past few years, heat transfer printing were mainly used in the printing of novelty items, such as polyester tops and T-shirts. But today heat transfer printing has gained significant importance and favour in several industries, especially in the personalised gift industry as an alternative for printing more unique personalised gifts with no MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity),” said Vincent.
In fact, the team at Printcious.com are no strangers to the trade as they have already been in the heat transfer printing business since 2008. Other than Printcious.com, they also own several other printing related websites.
One of these websites is DIYPrintingSupply.com, a B2B that mainly supplies all kinds of DIY gift printing machines, equipment and materials for those entrepreneurs who would like to start a low cost high profit printing business of their own.
Part Of A MaGIC Trick
Printcious.com came about because the team wished to advocate the culture of gift-giving in order to foster the relationships among people. With this initiative, they were actually selected to be part of the MaGIC Accelerator Program, a leading accelerator program in the Asian region.
Vincent shared that MaGIC validated their business models and ideas as well as connected them with an avenue to expand their business. Through the program, they were able to engage with people whom they can leverage on for resources. Besides that, the team at Printcious.com also received constructive feedback for their business plan which steered them into a better direction.
“Since end of July 2015, we have been meeting a lot of great mentors who are very experienced in e-commerce, financial planning, business modeling, Internet marketing and more. They are willing to share their knowledge with us, always pointing out our problems on our business model, website, marketing strategy etc., and providing their valuable advices in making Printcious.com a better website,” said Vincent.
Gifting The Gifted
It is only the beginning of the road for Printcious.com but they have already received favourable responses from the public. Therefore, in the future, they would like to transform Printcious.com from an online store to an online marketplace.
Vincent says that there will be plans by end of 2015, to introduce a new feature for all who wish to design for Printcious.com whereby they are able to submit/upload their own designs onto the online platform and get it printed on various gift items.
“We welcome all graphic designers to join our online marketplace to resell their designs and make profit once our customers buying their designs. Once customers have chosen their designs to be printed on gifts, we will share a portion of revenue with them. Currently we have more than a thousand designs, and we would like to add another 100,000 designs for different interests such as geek, humor, fitness, sport and programming,” added Vincent.
Other than that, they will be adding more gift options to the site by the end of this year including puzzles, phone cases, bookmarks and more.
