Minneapolis-based PostcardBuilder was highlighted in yesterday's Star Tribune newspaper "Promotional postcards prove profitable, popular".

The company has built a profitable business around offering Web-based design and ordering of a single printed product: the promotional postcard:

Kurt Johnson had this promising idea for a new business: a generic website where smaller corporate clients could design their own promotional postcards, then have his company print and mail them at an affordable cost.

According the Star Tribune article, the business has seen tremendous growth since it was started in 2002. The company expects to exceed their initial estimate of $4.8 million in revenues in 2008:

In mid-2002, they founded Minneapolis-based PostcardBuilder, a company that has accumulated more than 2,000 clients in virtually every state and has grown to nearly $4 million in annual revenue. And with sales in the first three months of 2008 running well ahead of projections, the partners expect the 2008 gross to significantly exceed their initial estimate of $4.8 million.

I'm not aware of the technology or processes PostcardBuilder has in place to fulfill oreders, but companies that constrain their product offerings are the ones that see the most profit when adopting Web-enable production workflows. I wrote about this in a Printing Industry Center research monograph that examined Web-To-Print Architectures. In the monograph I present the concept of deterministic print production workflows. These "workflows rely on catalogs of predefined attributes and rules or logic to dictate the design and production of a print product. The limits placed on the design parameters such as paper stock, color versus monochrome printing, bind-ing and finishing methods, and product dimensions allow for highly automated print production systems to be engineered. These turnkey print production systems are highly efficient and require little human intervention. In fact, they might be the ‘Holy Grail’ of computer-integrated manufacturing the print industry is attempting to achieve."

It appears that this is precisely what PostcardBuilder has done.