Pressplane, they very stealth Seattle startup we covered when they raised $1.7 million from Second Avenue Partners along with a slew of hot-shot individual angel investors exactly 6 months ago, is turning the lights on today with a different brand name and a seemingly strong offering for businesses. The new name is Inkd, and the service will be officially announced this morning (the kick-off blog post was published last Friday).
So we already knew Curious Office, the incubator behind Pressplane / Inkd, was working on a service geared towards businesses yet centered around a user-generated community, which is no surprise given their previous success applying that same strategy building Imagekind, an online marketplace for art (acquired by Cafepress for $15-$20 million in cash and stock in July 2008) and seeding Shelfari, a community for book lovers (acquired by Amazon in August 2008). We also found out early that Curious Office was betting on something to do with dead trees, and both have checked out.
Inkd is essentially a buy and sell marketplace for printed materials (think brochures, business cards, flyers, envelopes, etc.) where business owners can cherry pick original templates made by professional designers. Each creative is unique and gets screened by the Inkd team before ending up in the marketplace. If a business owner or marketer doesn’t find what they’re looking for, they can put out a request to Inkd (not directly to designers) and the startup will take it from there. Creatives who submit material to the design collection are paid a 20% percent royalty fee on the total retail sale for each transaction that ensues, but in the future Inkd plans to debut an ‘exclusive’ membership with higher commission fees.
Inkd print templates (of which 800 are already present) are made available for immediate download in a wide variety of file formats and include page layout files, along with photos and artwork. The files are fully editable and can be customized to suit any project. You can get some free samples from the Inkd website (hover over the ‘Learn’ tab) to see how they come out.
What Curious Office has done is apply a well thought-out business model that has already proven its value in other fields (iStockphoto for stock images and Logoworks for logos spring to mind) to an industry that’s dying for some innovation and execute it extremely well. The advantages for business in terms of cost and time saving are clear, the lay-out and copy of the Inkd website are great, pricing seems reasonable and there are some very smart and accomplished people involved with this company. I’m having trouble finding competitors with an equally strong offering too, although BrandDoozie may come closest.
That said, Inkd’s biggest challenges will be attracting enough professional designers to keep the flow going (and keep them coming back for more), and marketing its services to the plethora of business owners who could benefit from the marketplace but may not realize services like this exist at all or are stuck to the traditional model of working with communication agencies and freelance graphic designers.
Yet somehow, I think we’ve got a winner on our hands, and it’s great to see the Seattle startup and investment ecoystem at work.
This is a great idea. A company like Vistaprint could have made a bundle with this.
Really loving this idea. Wonder if it’ll help or hurt the freelance designer more? Is 20% enough?
i like the idea a lot… but i like the presentation better
good article; especially the last paragraph
it’s always nice to read something with at least a little bit of research behind it, and without ridiculous reasoning (ahem.. erik and sarah)
Does everyone use the word stealth to sound cool? Isn’t it just a synonym for “we haven’t told anybody what we’re doing because we don’t want anyone to steal it”?
Get off my lawn.
Of course that is a tough balance, you want to get far enough that you are a leader, but need to get the word out and people using it as soon as possible. Never an easy task when you are building a new service. I guess “stealth” naturally gets people wanting to see it and creates some hype
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This is a very cool idea, will be fun to watch how they do. The key of course is getting enough content from people to have a healthy display. In the beginning they’ll have to attract people to post stuff.
Upload ze favicon team!
To keep the pipeline of content flowing, the Company should reach out to student designers. Students in programs like those offered at advertising/graphic design centric institutions like VCU Adcenter and Miami Ad School would benefit from the exposure and revenue sharing.
Who is the intended user? Obviously that person has to have Adobe CS applications to use these templates.
Now this person can be a designer or not. If designer, why would he buy when he can create one. You might say, cost cutting.
If not a designer (but still owns high-end design applications), wont he/she runs a chance of screwing up the template?
Having said that, this could prove to be a good cost cutting tool for companies where marketing services are first on the chopping block.
Good luck,
Kapil
twitter.com/ktundwal
Great analysis Kapil. I think initially our user will be designers and marketers who have familiarity with design applications. Increasingly, many in-house marketers are gaining proficiency with these applications.
Kelly Smith
Founder: inkd.com
I had an idea like this back in 2002 when I was a graphic artist. When you do work for clients you usually end up with 3 or 4 comps / prototypes, from which the client picks from. So what do you do with the other 2 or 3 leftover? To me I just considered them inventory. So my idea was to start a market place where graphic artists can sell their remaining inventory. Sure you would have to alter the designs so they don’t cause issues with the client. The designs are usually totally different from each other, thus the reason you may 3 or 4.
“marketing its services to the plethora of business owners who could benefit from the marketplace but may not realize services like this exist at all or are stuck to the traditional model of working with communication agencies and freelance graphic designers.”
There’s already a handful of online sites to find graphic designers like ifreelance.com and guru.com. Speaking as a small business owner, the “traditional” model is great– I email my graphic designer and he creates exactly what I want. Why in the world would good designers put a lot of effort into selling a design for 20% of $100 when they can make 10 times that working directly for clients?
I think that the reason why i should sell the content is that it is scalable. You create one design and can sell it 100 times. Without any additional work.
Michael,
The reason a designer might work with us is because they can sell their design thousands of times instead of selling it just once. And, we are a great way to drive freelance business to them as well. Stay tuned for more enhancements! It’s only our first day!
Kelly Smith
also, i think the quote that michael used also points out that the potential buyers will drive designers to the site (obviously). if you can provide a *good* marketplace for designers, then designers can should be able to calculate the trade-offs themselves…
i guess it’s all about ‘presentation’… presenting the advantages for designers, and for users who might do well to use work from multiple designers.
One feature that might be interesting to add is to have a basic template price (buyer downloads the template and customizes it) and a customized price, where the buyer would pay extra to have a designer customize the template for them and they would have it ready for download within x hours.
Agree
Looking at this now because it could be a huge help for us in terms of quick/easy design work. I agree with Kelli, at this point most in house marketing departments have CS or something similar in which to work with templates like these. Would love to hear from anyone who has gone ahead and used the service.
This is great! Streamlining these products, especially professional looking brochures will be very helpful.
Great job on the launch Kelly.
From my perspective, you’ve nailed it with a site/service for:
1) businesses where “designing is not their business”; and,
2) designers where “business is not always begotten by design”.
Simple solution to solve big problems for both types. They quality of design and templates you’ve assembled in short order is phenomenal. Your concept takes a lot of the quesswork and time out of finding designers, getting quotes, and getting cool stuff printed.
I’m a fan, a convert, and an enthusiast of your company. Nice work.
Nice job and good luck…
Wake up and Smell the Coffee…
I’m not too sure about this one, I downloaded the free sample, and the picture link in the file was incorrect, and the fonts were missing. Plus there was no bleed or trim marks indicated and the size was imperial, seemed to be an odd size (11.25 x 8.75in) like some bleed was included but not all.
I can fix the picture link without much trouble, but I think someone in marketing would really struggle to make the changes needed to use these templates (particularly from europe or other metric countries) , and would end up paying a designer to change what was needed anyway. Which I think would lead the company to just engage a designer from the beginning next time.
A larger problem is the fonts. I can see why they weren’t included (obvious licensing problem), but many people will see this as a ‘istock’ type setup and assume everything needed is supplied. They won’t be happy with ponying up another $40+ per font (more if it’s something high end). Plus then you need to assume the editor is comfortable installing the fonts on their system (not simple if you don’t have dedicated software).
The only market I can see for something like this is someone working in marketing or similar who has basic design training but isn’t comfortable creating something from scratch. Even then I doubt if they could do much beyond inserting body copy and making colour changes.
Well done on the designs, they are definitely very high quality, lets hope that the standard is maintained once the site starts to become popular.
Hi jeffunity,
When you open up an Illustrator or InDesign file, the application looks for linked images relative to your design file. Sometimes you might have to relink the files, I know its a pain but these apps weren’t designed to work in a completely networked environment. There’s no way around this unfortunately.
As far as the missing fonts – we can’t actually resell these typefaces yet, so for the moment we’re providing you with the font names in a “readme” text file that should be located in the same folder as your design files. You can certainly purchase the typefaces online, but we cannot distribute them. Your computer will most likely substitute system fonts if you don’t have the specific ones that the designer used.
There are two layers in the file – a Template layer and an Artwork layer. The Template layer contains guides such as Fold, Safety, Trim, and Bleed Lines. The document size is actually larger to accomodate any bleeds setup in the file. When you go to print, the printer will trim your document to the correct finished size.
Funny enough, I mostly see this as a tool for design firms (although I see the use for in-house creative teams too). Often it isn’t practical to create multiple unique designs for a client because of budget. With this site, you could do one unique and two licensed.
Sometimes it’s not even necessary because of the limited use case and shelf life. Heck, one of the most high-profile brand images on the net, the Twitter bird, isn’t even owned by Twitter! It’s an iStock image any of us can download at any time.
Although…I’m a fan of custom design and creativity. To me there’s nothing ’stock’ about distinctive design.
Still, congrats Kelly. I’ll definitely be sharing this with my friends
Someone needs to do this for applications. I’d love to be able to pick up a “blank” RSS reader app for the iphone and customize it for my niche. Or an Adobe Air app that links my users.
How does iStockapps sound?
In other words, They take 80% commission (EIGHTY %!!) to sell my hard work in their shop!
am i the only one who finds the commission ratio a bit ridiculous?
guru/elance/ebay’s commission structure draft in comparison!
Even though the site compares itself to Etsy & Zazzle, I think it is actually closer to a website called StockLayouts (www.stocklayouts.com) where you can search for design templates for all the same products and download them.
What Inkd has added is the crowdsourcing/community piece which if, from a business standpoint, can be achieved by merely kicking back 20% of the sale to the designer community, makes all the sense in the world. Does that make ratio make sense for designers remains to be seen. If it does make sense, I agree with your assessment, this will be a winner.
Nice site! Usability is very good.