Another acquisition! As our industry continues to consolidate we can expect to see more.

Printable had been offering image personalization through a licensing arrangement with Direct Smile. Printable’s CEO Coleman Kane indicated that the company discovered that customers liked the concept of image personalization, but he felt he needed to find a more affordable pricing model in order to really grow the business. DirecType was up for sale; although there was already one bidder, Kane was able to get in on the deal and ultimately won the bidding process.

As the press release indicates, Printable will be rebranding DirecType as Fusion Pro Expressions, and plans to integrate it with Fusion Pro Desktop, which can also generate QR codes, next month. This will also allow output of Fusion Pro Expressions images without a watermark, which was not available with Printable’s previous implementation.

Kane commented, “We found that there is a true market demand for image personalization, and by owning our own technology, we are able to deliver and integrate it more thoroughly, and we are free to distribute it in a desktop version, which is much more cost effective. We think the technology is so good, it needs to be available to the masses at a reasonable price well within the reach of any printer, graphic services or marketing communications operation.” Fusion Pro Expressions is priced at $799.

Printable already has about 15,000 users of Fusion Pro Desktop, and Kane believes many of them will be interested in adding this capability. He adds, “We can also offer image personalization within MarCom Central more affordably, because there is no click fee, just a small monthly fee to use the capability.”

Printable also announced a new strategic alliance with Ricoh at IPEX. Read the press release.

Both announcements are good news for Printable and its customers. The company continues to expand its offerings into the marketing services arena, keeping prices affordable. Although there was some controversy a couple years ago when Printable dramatically reduced the cost of Printable Desktop, it paid off in the end with a growing user group whose members help each other and presumably take some of the customer support burden off of Printable resources. At this price point, we expect to see similar pick-up of image personalization by a wide variety of printing firms, especially if the user interface is easy, it has good templates, and custom template creation by Printable is affordable and fast.