Bookfactory + Printbox – a joyful photo products experience on the Swiss market

Two years ago Swiss photo products experts Bookfactory chose Printbox as their software provider. Here you can find a summary of how fruitful this relationship has become.

About Bookfactory

Bookfactory is a brand owned by Bubu AG, a family-run Swiss provider of bookbinding solutions operating since 1941. Bubu built its reputation on craftsmanship, quality, and using the best materials available, often sourced locally. You can feel all that tradition and attention to detail when you hold a premium Bookfactory photo product in your hands.

Why did Bookfactory start looking for an online solution?

Bookfactory was the first company to launch desktop photobook software in Switzerland 16 years ago. Family companies so deeply rooted in tradition always have to look for ways of reinventing themselves, staying modern, and being in line with the latest technology. In 2018 the decision was made to keep offline software but add a new experience for customers and move part of the business online. At that point, Bookfactory had no online store and no online editors. It had a great and dedicated team but no in-house IT development. Building their own software would require a lot of time and effort. Bookfactory started to evaluate for the best white label solution on the market and after weeks of talks and testing various products they chose Printbox.

Bookfactory’s requirements

This is what Bookfactory was looking for when they embarked on a mission to find a good software provider:

• Rock-solid editors and e-commerce solution, integrated
• Capable dev team ready for heavy customization e.g. backend integration and implementation of Swiss payment gateway
• Business partner who know photo products world inside out
• Potential for a long-lasting relationship

Key challenges and how Printbox fought them off

If you want to establish a photo product online presence and need to start basically from scratch, there will be several obstacles along the way. This is how Printbox helped navigate them.

Time-to-market

Bookfactory wanted to be ready just in time for the 2018 peak season.

The Printbox team had four months to implement a good online store from scratch and that it succeded shows what a great team of tech people and project managers can do. It’s an experience we used often for our future deployments. Bookfactory would have probably needed two years to create a custom online shop and product editors on their own so they were very happy to have saved loads of time.

No internal development

So Bookfactory from limited online presence went to a fully-fledged online store with great online editors in just four months. But that wasn’t the moment when problems with no internal development stopped. Bookfactory had its desktop software and a PDF-to-Book solution. Printbox added to the mix its core product and iOS/Android applications. But there was no proper ecosystem. Printbox connected the applications via API integration. In that respect, it acted as an external IT team which helped to aggregate data in one place and rebuilt an important part of Bookfactory’s new backend powered by Symphony from the German company ctrl-s.

Big portfolio of design ideas

To fully understand the sheer richness of Bubu’s portfolio you have to take a look at the Bindorama, Bubu’s bookbinding library showcasing everything they are capable of. Not everything is available for the actual Bookfactory photo products, but still, you can only imagine how good product configurators must be to be able to fit Bookfactory’s requirements.

Printbox’s advanced, flexible configurators allowed Bookfactory to present all the available options in the best way possible. Moreover, our editors – the heart and soul of Printbox, and their user-friendliness and customization possibilities made sure that the photo products design process is a fun experience.

How Bookfactory profited from the relationship

Bookfactory wanted to go live quickly and this was achieved in four months. But for the Swiss photo products experts working with a software provider does not end with a one-off purchase – it’s a journey that started in 2018. Bookfactory found an experienced tech team that can be counted upon, is easy to exchange ideas with and has the practical know-how. Both sides push themselves hard to get the most out of this business relationship for their respective customers.

We chose Printbox because we thought that their user-friendly and feature-rich product editors as well as flexible product configurators do match our requirements and our quite big portfolio of options best. Hence, Printbox will give our customers the easiest and most joyful experience in the Swiss market.

Robert Becker, Chief Digital Officer, Bubu

Bookfactory rebooted their marketing team and strategy and started to put digital marketing heavily in the mix, Printbox’s flexible shop and discounts are making this possible. The company is growing steadily with Printbox’s online part of the business reaching 10% of total revenue after two years.