February 10 2009
Innovative
E-Commerce Platform Aggregates Print Service Providers to Offer Convenient,
Choice-Rich Online Printing to Businesses and Individuals
New York, NY– February
10, 2008 – Earthtone’s online printing service goes live today with a launch of
its cutting-edge e-commerce platform that is set to revolutionize the way
people shop for print services. As of today, Earthtone will be available in the Northeast
and will rapidly roll out
nationwide over the coming months .
In
an online printing market dominated by a few big-brand printers, Earthtone’s
vendor-neutral business model empowers consumers by giving them easy, impartial
access to hundreds of smaller, independent printers across the US. With nearly 1,000 independent printers signed
up already, and more joining each week, Earthtone enables consumers to find,
compare and order from the supplier best suited to meet their unique
requirements. Earthtone’s vendor-neutral platform helps people to find and use the
print provider best suited for their unique requirements.
“E-commerce
is driven by consumers who recognize that transparent information and more
choice empowers them to make uncompromised purchasing decisions,” says Nader
Alaghband, Earthtone’s Founder
and CEO. “ Earthtone is the first service designed to give print buyers the
choice they want and the information they need.”
I n an economic climate that demands the efficient
allocation of resources, Earthtone’s enterprise-grade e-commerce platform is a secure, user-friendly
way to shop for prints online. Whether it’s reports, presentations or any other
type of print - and whether specialist services, environmental credentials,
quality, or value is the driver of decision making -
Earthtone makes it easy for businesses and individuals to search
for, compare and choose the print provider best suited to their needs.
Moreover,
as working patterns change and mobile Internet, smaller computers and global
communications solutions facilitate an explosion in flexible working, Earthtone
provides a solution to the mobile printing problem. In the US, the mobile
workforce is growing at 20% each year, but unlike almost every other part of
the mobile professional’s workflow printing’s
inherent immobility makes it a real obstacle to “on the road” productivity. Earthtone gives
mobile professionals a convenient and efficient way to find and use the nearest
printer. Smartphone users will be able to connect to
Earthtone’s printing network where they will be able to easily
store, share and print their files.
Whether
you’re a mobile professional looking for convenient printing, a business
looking for secure printing or a consumer looking for choice, you can start
using Earthtone for free and in less than a minute today.
To
find out more, please visit: www.earthtone.net
The Online Printing Market
The shift to online shopping is well
documented. Businesses and consumers are turning to e-commerce because they
recognize that the internet gives them convenient and efficient access to more
information - allowing them to find the products and services they want – and
more choice, enabling them to make better and more informed purchasing
decisions.
Despite the dominant presence of a
few big brands, the $12 billion quick printing industry is almost completely
(90 percent) composed of smaller, locally-focused and independently operated print
businesses. Without the economies of scale or the technical expertise to
develop and deploy the world class online printing capabilities required to
compete with the market leaders, these small businesses’ ability to attract and
retain online customers has been significantly limited.
As a result, consumers and businesses
who want to buy prints online have had a very limited choice of proprietary
solutions to choose from. These solutions limit buyers to a single list of
services while their opaque pricing is designed to inhibit buyers’ ability to
compare suppliers.
“ Until now, e-commerce hasn’t empowered
print buyers in the way it has benefited buyers of books, CDs or flights for
many years ,” says Nader Alaghband, Earthtone’s
Founder and CEO.
“Sometimes you know exactly what you
want and you know where to get it. For example, if you want to fly with a
specific airline, you’ll use their proprietary site to book your tickets. More
often, you want to fly at a convenient time of day, or you want the best value
ticket, so you’ll use an aggregator like Expedia which gives you information
from all the airlines in one place. We see Earthtone as the first ‘Expedia’ for
print services.”
User Scenarios
Small Business
It’s time to reprint the company
brochure. You’ve got the artwork ready and you have the number of one of the
local print centers. Great! It shouldn’t take you more than an hour to make two
phone calls and send your file over to the printer by email. In a day or two
you’ll make a quick visit to the store to collect your order and hey presto!
You’re done.
“Well, not that ’Great!’, actually,”
says David Reid, Earthtone’s Founder and CFO. “That’s a lot of time to spend
trying to buy prints. As a small business ourselves, we know how important it
is to spend your time and money wisely.
“Using Earthtone you can search for
the print provider best suited to your needs – whether that’s uncomplicated
value for money or a highly specialized type of binding from an environmentally
friendly local print business – submit your print job securely and pay online
in less than 2 minutes. Thanks to an integrated shipping feature, buyers can
choose to buy from any of the 1000+ printers on the network, getting their job
delivered to their doorstep the next day. Earthtone is a choice-rich online
printing venue that empowers online print buyers with the same tools that
buyers of books and CDs have enjoyed for years.”
Mobile
Professionals
Whether you’re in the airport waiting
for a flight, in a hotel room in an unfamiliar city or a Starbucks on Main
Street, if you’ve got an internet connection and your laptop or Blackberry, you
can be just as productive as if you were in the office.
Well. Not quite. You can create,
share, collaborate and store your data wherever you are; but printing is an
important part of your in-office workflow and something that you just can’t do
on the move. We all know how frustrating it is to have to wait till you’re at
someone’s office, at which point you have to spend hours trying to get your
computer connected just to get a hardcopy.
“Earthtone delivers efficient,
convenient on-demand printing to the mobile generation,” says Fadi Bizri, VP
for Product Management at Earthtone. “It may be an innovative example of cloud
computing or Infrastructure as a Service, but Earthtone isn’t cutting-edge
technology for its own sake – it’s a solution tailored to mobile people who
want to print where they are, when they need it.
“When you’re mobile, you usually want
a fast turnaround so we help you search for printers near you and we give you a
range of features, shortcuts and other tools to make comparing and buying as
quick as possible. Whether you’re using our mobile-optimized site to print from
a small screen device like a Blackberry or our main site on a laptop, secure
online file storage, email-based uploads, job-status notifications,
accounts-friendly invoicing and much more makes Earthtone
a feature-rich balance between form
and function.”
Student/Consumer
When you put a lot of hard work into
making an assignment just right, the last thing you need is to ruin the effect
at the last step. You want that project printed in color, possibly on special
paper, nicely bound and ready to hand off. But your deadline’s coming up fast
and your home printer and a staple in the top corner won’t make the grade. So
you need a 24-hour print provider close to you.
You could go to Google and type in
’24-hour printing in MyTown’ but who knows what you’ll find. With Earthtone,
you don’t have to settle for whatever you find first. You can search for
exactly the kind of print you want with exactly the extra options you need and
find only what’s relevant to you. If what matters most is making the deadline,
you can just search by location, finding and comparing all the nearest print
providers efficiently, so that whatever you end up choosing, it meets your
needs.
“Our mission is plain and simple: to
help consumers find the best print provider for them,” says Kourosh Kaghazian,
Earthtone’s VP for Business Development. “Earthtone is the fastest way to find
and compare services and pricing from over 1000 print providers, according to
your specific requirements.
“But we understand that there’s more
to making the right choice than having information at your disposal. Things
like eco-ratings and user-reviews help you make a more informed decision while
soft proofing, test printing and the ability to communicate directly with your
print provider help reduce the chances that what you get isn’t exactly what you
want.”
About Earthtone
Earthtone provides world-class e-commerce solutions to meet verified needs in the online printing sector. With US operations based in New York and global headquarters in London, Earthtone brings cutting-edge online shopping to choice-starved print buyers and opportunity-hungry print sellers.
Earthtone’s vendor-neutral online printing platform connects businesses and individuals to a network over 1000 independently operated print providers in the US and the UK. The platform provides an efficient gateway to transparent information, robust e-commerce facilities and an uncompromised online shopping experience designed to empower buyers with choice and sellers with growth opportunities.
For more information about Earthtone, please visit: www.earthtone.net
Business Contact: Media Contact:
Earthtone Ltd Blanc & Otus PR
Kourosh Kaghazian Elizabeth Yekhtikian
Tel: +44 (0)20 7112
7100 Tel: +1 617-451-7352
Email: kourosh@earthtone.net
Email: eyekhtikian@blancandotus.com