PALO ALTO, Calif., August 7, 2008 – HP today announced that one of its Graphics Solutions Business customers, Digital Printing and Imaging (DPI), is using an HP Indigo press 5000 to produce nearly two million personalized youth-league baseball cards in an innovative sports-themed promotion with Nestlé Drumstick brand sundae cones. Through the program, consumers can visit a DPI-developed web site, upload an image, enter a youth's team name and player statistics, view a PDF proof and then order a pack of 16 cards.

DPI's print production workflow for the cards includes an internally developed web-to-print application linked into an HP SmartStream workflow driving the HP Indigo press 5000. The HP Indigo press provides the true offset quality, speed, and high uptime needed to make the baseball card program a success. 

Developed with the goal of reinforcing the Drumstick brand name during the current baseball season, the Nestlé Drumsticks program began earlier this year, with a baseball card offer appearing on every package of vanilla Drumsticks in the U.S.

High value and high demand with HP Indigo quality

"Finding opportunities, especially those that create new products through web-to-print applications, is central to what HP offers its customers in the Print 2.0 world," said Rich Raimondi, vice president and general manager, U.S. Graphics Solutions Business, HP. "DPI is doing what digital printing does best with HP Indigo technology – pursuing profitable growth in a unique application where unmatched image quality can lead to high value and high demand."

DPI earned the contract for this program based on the experience it has gained in becoming one of the Southeast's most progressive firms for digital printing and print fulfillment.

"In our competitive bidding process, we were ultimately going against an agency that would subcontract its printing and another print service provider that did not own an HP Indigo press," said Susan Moore, president, DPI. "The quality we are able to offer with the HP Indigo press, as well as our highly developed web-to-print workflows, gave Nestlé the confidence that we would be providing a best-in-class solution that reaches a target audience in a way no other promotion can."

With the baseball card application, DPI is now filling nearly all of its production time for one shift on its HP Indigo press 5000 in a highly streamlined operation. DPI's workflow systems automatically impose cards in gang runs, with each printed sheet on the press containing 18 different card images. DPI prints 16 sheets at a time, and the cards are efficiently UV coated, cut, stacked, packaged and shipped to the consumer in a process that does not require collation.

DPI's extensive experience offering web-to-print solutions for business-to-business applications proved helpful in its Nestlé program, which is DPI's first major business-to-consumer offering. For the program, DPI programmed a template building interface that covers text layout and image cropping. The company also offers a toll-free line to assist consumers in creating cards but, thanks to the site's intuitive design and instructions, less than one percent of orders require telephone assistance.

DPI is currently examining additional opportunities to replicate this program in other industries, creating even more consumer-oriented applications with its HP Indigo print operation.