De Budelse recently made gift-giving more personal with customized chocolate boxes produced for Dutch chocolate maker Verkade. The graphics services provider located in Budel, Netherlands uses XMPie PersonalEffect, in conjunction with XMPie Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), to drive an e-commerce site for Verkade customers to select, customize, order and pay for an entirely unique chocolate gift.

Launched for the 2009 Christmas season, more than 24,000 personalized chocolate boxes were sold leading up to the holiday, hitting a peak of three orders per minute and driving €214,800 in revenue for Verkade in just six weeks. 

The Verkade Web site allows customers to create personalized chocolate boxes online by choosing from several box designs, some allowing for the incorporation of personalized text and uploaded images. Customers can input a message and image to appear on the chocolate box, as well as recipient address and sender details. The personalized chocolate boxes can then be three-dimensionally previewed and the order approved. Completing the process, customers are re-directed to a payment gateway for a secure transaction.

Once the order is placed, De Budelse produces the personalized boxes on its Xerox iGen4 Presses. The company then provides the boxes to a fulfillment partner for filling with chocolates and shipment to recipients.

De Budelse uses XMPie PersonalEffect for this application and others because of its variable data processing speed and APIs. By taking advantage of XMPie's APIs and open architecture, De Budelse was able to create a custom, robust Web portal with variable capabilities seamlessly integrated. It also allowed for the connection to the payment gateway for an easy and secure order processing.

This unique application has allowed Verkade to create a premium offering from a traditionally mass market product through the incorporation of personalization and has given the chocolate maker an innovative way to drive additional revenue. Verkade and De Budelse are exploring the possibility of expanding the offering to include Mother's Day, Father's Day and Christmas 2010.

De Budelse continues to see increased demand for this type of application from consumer-focused organizations and anticipates this will drive substantial new business for the graphics services provider into the future.