Printo opens stores in Chennai and Pune
Printo has unveiled a new expansion structure - it's second phase outside Bengaluru - having opened a shop in Pune a week ago and in Chennai three months ago. With this, the print retail chain hopes to see an improvement in the performance of its print operations and push up overall profitability at the group.
08 Aug 2016 | 15146 Views | By Sriraam Selvam
In 2008, Printo had opened stores in Pune, Mumbai and other cities in 2008, but had to close them in under a year after a funding crunch.
Manish Sharma, CEO said, "Our initial expansion phase was based on equity infusion, but when we were unable to raise additional funding, we had to close all shops outside of Bengaluru."
Sharma added, ""We have now decided that our expansion should happen from internal capital through a 'hub-and-spoke model.' We decided to expand to Chennai and Pune only after we broke even in Hyderabad last year."
Sharma said Printo will spend about Rs 10 crore on new city expansions in the next year.
The company leadership rests between Manish Sharma and the Balu Iyer, the president. Together they work on a strategy together but Iyer leads the implementation.
The Printo store in Pune is located inside the Infosys campus. Besides hiring a team, the company will add two more shops in the city, soon. In addition, it will add two more shops in Chennai by the end of 2016. Sharma said, "We are keeping our new city teams extremely lean and giving time for the managers to grow into their roles."
Currently, Printo has 22 shops in four cities. Printo had opened up 11stores across several cities but had to close them down after it ran out of capital to keep the stores running following a fallout with its investor Sequoia over valuation. Sharma said. "Our plan is to have an outlet in Delhi NCR in 2017."
Printo sees a 50-50 division between individual printing orders and business orders, but gets 75% of its revenue from the latter.
Sharma said, "Digital print is clearly a big enabler but only a proximate driver. Underlying changes that seem to driving quick print service is the way businesses are communicating (more frequently, more targeted) and the way businesses are able to generate high quality ‘printable’ content using easy publishing tools and images - on their laptops or on the web.
Finally, photo content (which is a good part of our business) has boomed with individuals looking for products to embellish with their photos."