Located just northwest of Seattle in the once sleepy town of Bothell, the owners of Bottle Your Brand are brainstorming how to deal with the increased production costs without sacrificing quality. “We’ve operated with the same material type and production process for almost 15 years now” says one of the owners. BYB was started back in 2003 and has evolved into one of the most popular web to print companies for customers looking to order short runs of custom labels, stickers and bottled water. They specialize in wine, beer and water bottle labels but have more recently moved into the sticker space with laptop stickers, hydro flask stickers, etc.
Reducing Waste and Increasing Profits with SaaS
“The issue we were facing was twofold. First since the start of Covid and more recently with inflation we have incurred almost half a dozen price increases on raw materials. Two, we were tied to a dated piece of software that merged PDF files before we would print them. And that software merged those files fairly inefficiently” says the owner. Without compromising on quality by switching to a lower cost material BYB needed a solution alleviating both the increase in product costs and removing the dated software. After testing out a handful of desktop imposition tools with no real luck they stumbled upon File Splice. File Splice is a newer (built during Covid) cloud based SaaS that allows users the ability to quickly set up templates for merging PDFs. “It was exactly what we needed”. “We were up and running tests within literally a few minutes and merged it into our production process the next day.” The system handles merging large amounts of PDF files with variable quantities and automatically generates cover sheets so we can quickly and easily identify and sort orders within large batches.
Doing More With Less
As previously mentioned, BYB was tied to a 15 year old apple script to merge dozens, sometimes hundreds of variations of PDF files all with variable quantities. Not only was the code dated but it lived in a very old server in the corner of their production warehouse. Not an ideal setup. “We really didn’t want to invest further in that setup since it was such a dated model. With File Splice we’ve been able to do a few things. First we’re able to reduce our liability because if our press does go down for any reason we can still impose our files and export them to a back up printer if need be. Second we have gone back and maximized the space on the sheets in order to get the most out of each sheet. In doing so we’ve reduced as much waste as possible and for many sizes increased the amount of labels on a page. Third is the overage, the old apple script was coded to add three extra PDFs in each run. This could mean on any given day we were wasting dozens of sheets of material. With File Splice the overage can be adjusted on they fly.”
Moving forward Bottle Your Brand utilized a custom API to streamline their workflow by pushing print ready PDFs directly into the File Splice system further reducing their costs and margin for error. Another bonus is there is a team feature. Within that feature accounts that are a team can collaborate by uploading files visible to all members. This meant that multiple customer service reps can work together to upload files for production further increasing productivity.
Expanding into New Markets
With the flexibility and ease of use BYB has been able to bring some new products to market instantly rather than having to rely on a third party or worse manually imposing different sized PDFs. “We had been looking at ways to efficiently produce die cut stickers in extremely small quantities with no luck until we discovered File Splice” says the owner. “The trick is to impose the different shapes on a page and then batch produce, quantity is key to keeping costs under control when it comes to printing”.
With costs back under control (fingers crossed on inflation) and a mobile, reliable method of PDF imposition BYB continues to march forward and carve out new niches in the highly competitive sticker and label market.
