Back from ISA - RTD print on demand was a Home Run

We teamed with Roland at ISA this year and were able to print nearly 500 frisbees on demand that were created by visitors. Unlike other vendors who bring highly tuned test files for demo, our printing was entirely customer driven, mostly by photos from cell phones uploaded by cutomers themselves. We felt we have proven our abilities in the web environment, but this was a first for us driving a fast paced print-on-demand event.

We were quite pleased with the through-put we were able to achieve and greatly reducing staff time while keeping the printer busy with 1-up jobs. We see this as a huge advantage over the conventional method of having counter help interact with each customer during the entire design process. If you haven't yet installed a comouter or two running RTD in your showroom, you're missing the boat. You might even want to take RTD mobile to sporting events, festivals and fairs where profit margins can be much higher than your regular work.

We will be in Munich, Germany in a couple weeks at FESPA where we've teamed with Magnum Magnetics to print custom magnets on demand. If you are going there, please stop by and say hi. We are in booth A2-360.

Mark

A quick proof of concept:
A frisbee shown in RTD as a 3d virtual sample along with the physical object aside!

Yet another proof:
A quick collage with happy visitors and their own custom designed frisbee!!!!

Alex...

Congrats...on this. Excellent!

Please tell me more about it...

-What was Roland's print method? Direct to substrate? Or a print/cut label (laminated?)?
-UV? Latex? Solvent?
-What was the size of the particular machine(s) Roland used?
-Was this 100% customer accomplished or did you assist?

And anything else you think I may like/need to hear...

Thx!!

Dan D
Signlite

Print was ecosolvent on vinyl then applied to frisbee... At the last moment we were notified that Roland was running short on loaner flatbed UV printers. It would have been great to print right on the Frisbees. But as we saw it, any print method could be supported. The 6 RTD kiosks allowed several to be designing at once.

Things we learned...

1) We had several types of plugs on a USB hub for phoes and cameras to be connected. Droid phones are difficult to pull pics from using mini USB connections. Every model had different security/menus to allow the connection. Apples were a breeze.

2) We had some users who couldn't connect text message my phone with their photos... text pics are very low resolution - no resolution control like when I email from my iphone.

3) Attention time is very short at a tradeshow. Only a handful of users really "created" something worth keeping. We suspect (and are looking for) a festival or retail venue would bring a different clientele to the kiosk. Also, preparing template artwork ahead of the event is a must!

4) Watching users directly gave us some ideas for improving RTD but one attendant could easily support a lot of users. We are continuing to explore the kiosk idea for shows, events and retail. With all the print on demand equipment being sold for printing photo gifts 1-up, there is no real solution out there to supply artwork as fast as the printer can produce. RTD can do that and you can have an unlimited number of kiosks attached.

We did see a guy at the show with a self contained phone case kiosk/printer. It had just one terminal and one type of phone case. We estimated that the machine could at best make 3 phone cases per hour at $20 each for a mere investment of $30,000

Stay tuned.

Mark Sr.