Davis Sarmins is proudly the new Director of Growth Marketing at Printify. A lot has changed during the six years he’s spent at the company. They started by serving a niche segment of users looking for a print on demand solution. Now, inspire anyone looking to start their own business. Went from underdog to the most popular POD solution on the market with 11M+ users. Prior to joining Printify, Davis acted as the Head of Performance Marketing at Latvian financial startup TWINO.
Let’s start with a quick elevator pitch about Printify – how would you explain it to your grandmother?
Essentially, we take care of all your printing. We spread this message of Printify being the place where you can come and build your business, a message tightly connected to financial freedom, building additional revenue streams through e-commerce and print on demand.
Print on demand means it's an on demand production, you don't produce anything in bulk. The order from your customer comes, we fulfil it at one of our 117 partner facilities spread across the globe (most in the US, but also the UK, Canada, Australia), and ship it directly to your customer.
It has been widely popular over the recent years, especially during COVID years when e-commerce shot up.
Your success depends on the amount of people using your platform. What's your main challenge in marketing?
The platform itself is free and we take a small percentage of the sales.
Over the years, the challenge for us has changed from just finding people interested in doing print on demand to educating a huge audience on how to do it successfully.
The biggest challenge, absolutely hands down, is how to make somebody successful at business. We can provide all the tools, information, designs, but there's always this secret recipe. What’s the edge? How to find that niche? How to find the audience and demand?
Over the years, the challenge for us has changed from just finding people interested in doing print on demand to educating a huge audience on how to do it successfully.
So your ideal customer has to be good at their business. The worst possible scenario is that you have a lot of unsuccessful businesses wasting your resources. And the ideal would be a smaller number of highly successful users?
Absolutely, but it doesn’t work like that in real life. There's very few of these super successful businesses.
We definitely work with them, but where the real growth comes from is the middle segment. Somebody that knows what they're doing and is able to use our resources for further scaling. At the current stage of the market maturity, this seems to be the sweet spot.
We mostly work with solo entrepreneurs as well as small businesses with 5-10 employees, because for them, oftentimes, it's a nice additional revenue stream that they can add on top of their existing business. Even better if they have an international employee base. They can plug into Printify to send out company merch without having it centralised somewhere in headquarters.
Even though I would describe us as a B2B2C company, we definitely have B2B sales cycles for the larger segment. The solo entrepreneurs will have a cap on how much they can achieve, but SMBs have a lot more potential to scale further and probably the experience to do so.
How does the marketing messaging differ between solo entrepreneurs and SMBs?
For solos, it is leaning towards the aspirational part, generating mass awareness with the promise and a blueprint of building a better future, a better life. The last couple of years have been tough on the middle class. A lot of people are no longer satisfied with what a traditional 9-5 can offer.
Very high level marketing channels work for the solo entrepreneurs since you have to get them interested first and more in-depth industry channels for the SMBs.
For SMBs, it’s the scaling and creating an additional revenue stream. They are more interested in the actual parameters of the company. How much is this going to cost? How difficult is it to integrate?
So very high level marketing channels work for the solo entrepreneurs since you have to get them interested first and more in-depth industry channels for the SMBs.
Printify is a global company, how do you prioritise markets and segments?
We talked about the segments being SMBs, individual entrepreneurs, but we also have creators, brands, organisations like NGOs, and actually anybody looking to move to on demand production.
We have naturally skewed towards the US because their economy and consumer behaviour corresponds with these impulse and niche purchases. The tribe mentality or belonging to a certain group is also important.
Therefore, we have found most success in English speaking countries, but we also operate very actively in Europe. Over the recent years, we have seen promising growth in the largest EU countries. We are maybe less present in Asia due to their consumer behaviour being very different. Platforms like Shopify or Etsy are not dominant there and the purchasing power maybe doesn't really allow for these leisure purchases.
Still, speaking of solo entrepreneurs or small and medium businesses in the US, we're talking about tens of millions of potential customers, it's a huge market. How do you approach that? Running a Google or Meta campaign for 10 million people is extremely expensive. How do you segment this group?
We run it in a centralised manner from Riga. With roughly a third of the marketing team being remote across the EU. We decided to build a central marketing team that works with all the channels to build expert domain knowledge that can be then shared across the org. We engage in creating content, social ads, video content, long form, short form, partnerships, affiliates, influencers in literally any community that's relevant. Around 100 people are currently working to cover all these markets.
Whatever works in the US, we distribute and localise to specific markets (and that is actually not that difficult).
There's millions of users we need to approach and we are focused on being where they are, speak the language they speak and engage with them on channels they want to engage on. We have localised sales teams in more niche markets, but the marketing is global. Whatever works in the US, we distribute and localise to specific markets (and that is actually not that difficult).
Do you also do direct marketing, like collecting data or leads on specific businesses? The music record labels, for example. Do you have a database of all small independent record labels in California?
We definitely do. It's possible to scale to a very niche segment and provide personalised messages, which we do actively. But compared to other tactics, it is a very resource intensive activity: you need a large sales team, somebody that goes through the leads, validates those leads, accommodates their customer requests and all that.
Channels like B2B marketing podcasts, content creation on social platforms, and even B2B communities are something that helps cast a wider net specifically for these B2B businesses because they see you as an opinion leader. Our experts join panels and later we repurpose that content in all the channels our target businesses still interact with. We are present in the informational space and once they are ready to talk more in depth, we plug in the sales team.
Content and being a thought leader is important in your business. In the area of content, there is a lot of buzz about AI. What's your view on that? What's the role of humans versus robots in content creation?
If I'm a smaller company just starting out, using AI can be a very viable strategy to get up and running quickly. Very little risk involved.
At Printify, because we already have a massive content base, quite high positions in search, we use AI to augment human capabilities. Make sure that they can do faster research, write faster initial briefs, but every brief is still looked over by a human to make sure it actually provides value to the end reader and we don't risk being penalised by Google.
For me, it's an efficiency tool. You can easily get 50 percent more performance out of your writers, content managers by enabling them to use AI in terms of keyboard research, brief creation, initial drafts, proofreading, and all that.
The same goes for multiple sources of content. So let's say you have one video. Now you can use AI to transcribe that log into written content, make emails from it, even make an ebook and use it as a lead magnet eventually. You have to see what opportunities make sense for your business at any given stage.
You mentioned that there are trends in print on demand. What's trending now? What are the most successful products?
Apart from general global trends, the trends are determined by what the sellers offer and what they can compete with. The competition is increasing in POD, there's no doubt about it.
Even AI lowers the barrier to entry. You can create AI designs, you can speed up your process descriptions and find out what would make your basket size bigger. One option is personalisation. People are willing to spend more money on something that's made specifically for them. Let's say a canvas portrait with your family made in a specific style, specifically for you, one of a kind. It's a pretty high ticket item. Plus they layer the price of the personalisation on top of it, which makes it more valuable for the end consumer.
Speaking of quality, I recently attended several trade shows in the UK and Germany. The quality of the merchandise was very poor. What's the trend in your business? Do you see consumers preferring increasingly higher quality products?
They do and that's something that we focus an immense amount of energy on: delivering the quality that's satisfactory for the end consumer. And it's done in multiple ways.
As you said, consumers are more conscious of what they're buying, they don't necessarily want the cheapest product. We obviously offer both because there will be times when you would go with the cheapest option with acceptable quality, when the use case (sports event, themed bachelor party) allows it. But there's also an option for more premium products. The on demand model is already tendent towards less production, less waste, hence the eco friendly range is definitely expanding.
What are your main competitive advantages over the others?
It starts from the product range. If you only offer a limited selection, you're going to have a very tough time competing, because there's always going to be somebody doing it cheaper. That's why our advantage is the massive catalogue with over 900 products.
No other company even stands near that amount. We have a lot of people that come to us for a lamp or something very unusual, they see that the experience is great, and transfer all of their apparel products over to us as well.
And then the spread of facilities. Shipping something from the US to Germany is a pain. We have a lot of facilities locally that can produce the same products and save time and money for the merchants. It’s very important for international sellers.
And finally, I would say it's technology. So in terms of designing the most accurate mock ups, the AI tools, AI quality control and all that makes the experience just, just a little above.
Well, there are still several business merchandise, business gifts companies here in Estonia. Do you think POD is killing those traditional businesses?
Not for large quantities probably. But anything sub hundred pieces there's probably an easier way. You don't want to make those phone calls or close emails back and forth. You'd rather just go online, click a couple buttons.
And also from the facility side, at some point, it makes sense for those businesses to integrate into the platform and offer their merchandise to a wider audience, right?
And finally the question about ambition. Let's say 2030, which is six years from now. Can you describe the vision for Printify in 2030?
Our vision has always been to move the world towards on demand production, which will most likely go beyond POD. It could be beyond printing – 3D printing, laser cutting, custom manufacturing. And even beyond that.
We already have a lot of tooling assistance. I'm sure that by 2030 it will have developed in one way or another. To a point, where anyone can start a business in a couple of weeks with full assistance, full customisation. Hopefully, we can provide a platform to facilitate that.