We had the chance to catch up with Ryan Mastako, Senior eCommerce & Production Automation Director at AFB, to discuss how far they’ve come in eCommerce as a franchisor of nearly 600 locations in the print, signage and direct marketing spaces across North America and what he sees on the horizon for production automation.

Aleyant: Ryan, thanks for your time, can you tell us about Alliance Franchise Brands?

Ryan Mastako:  We are the franchisor of nine brands that provide marketing and print solutions (Allegra Marketing Print Mail, Insty-Prints, KKP, and American Speedy Printing Centers), signage solutions and installation (Image360, Signs By Tomorrow, Signs Now, and True Install), and RSVP Direct Mail Advertising. 

We always look for ways to help our Franchise Members to be more efficient and support them with growing their businesses. One system that can be a game-changer is eCommerce and it’s really taken off. We see eCommerce as a big driver for our Centers and started work with Aleyant in 2015 on Pressero. 

Aleyant: How would you say this is all going over the last decade?

RM:  We have about 100 of our Centers using Pressero and we are working with others to integrate it in their businesses. Franchise Members appreciate Pressero for its user-friendly interface, and their customers value the stores' simplicity and engaging design. One of the bigger pushes for us in 2025 is to get more Centers implementing workflow automation. 

Think about how you take orders from your customers. What happens to those orders when they come in? How can you minimize touchpoints when fulfilling orders? So, we see eCommerce as the starting point for improved automation and we put a lot of effort into thinking about how to streamline the process after orders come in. 

Aleyant: How do you measure success from those that have Pressero for eCommerce and those that don’t?

RM:  There are many ways to measure success with eCommerce, but we tend to emphasize more of the customer side. We frequently hear from our Franchise Members that they very rarely, if ever, lose a customer that is heavily using eCommerce. So, we call that “stickiness.” It's a great way to provide a high level service that in turn fosters long-term customer relationships. 

Aleyant: Can you explain stickiness?

RM:  One of the things Pressero does really well is it allows customers to personalize different items like business cards and signage. Once customers get used to how easy it is to order and reorder these items, they never want to let that go. 

Aleyant: How do you identify which of your Centers is a good candidate for Pressero?

RM:  I think almost all our print and signage Centers could see some benefit from eCommerce. We usually start by looking at their current client roster and identifying clients with frequent, repeat orders. These clients are ideal candidates for eCommerce, as a dedicated online store can be set up featuring their most commonly ordered products, making the ordering process faster and more efficient. Ideally, we’ll get a chance to show a customer a demo store, talk them through the benefits from their side, and then the platform mostly sells itself—it’s just so easy to use. 

We have a full team at our Home Office that handles the production of the stores, so if a Franchise Member wants us to build a store for them, we can. They don't have to learn the platform from a production standpoint. They can leave the heavy lifting to us.  

I'd say probably 80% of our Centers will take us up on that offer. Over time, we get them trained on how to operate and manage the store. They always have us as a support team and we can also lean on Aleyant’s extended support team as needed. 

Aleyant:  Do you have a success story from one of your Centers using Pressero?

RM:  Absolutely. We've got quite a few. One that's only a few miles from our corporate headquarters here in Michigan that I work with quite a bit is Allegra Highland.

This is a Center with a fairly lean staff. One of their key clients is a very large player in the healthcare space with several different brands and locations across the U.S. As you know, the healthcare industry is constantly growing, and this Center has seen their business grow right along with theirs. They have become the single point for all the print materials for this nationwide healthcare company. 

Before Pressero, the owner would be the first to tell you that he put in some pretty crazy hours, including long nights and weekends. Keeping up with all of the orders was much more than a full-time job for him and his staff. Once he got Pressero in place, things really started to improve. Now he has one main eCommerce store with “single sign on” so that all the healthcare employees can sign in with their organization’s email. Once they’re logged in, they can easily find their materials and place orders online. Then, on the back-end, he has the store integrated with his POS, so he doesn't have to write up all these orders. So the biggest testimony I got from him recently was, “Hey, I'm not crazy anymore! I’m working normal hours. And, my staff is as well.”  

Aleyant:  That’s great. Giving people in the industry their lives back. So, what’s on the horizon for the franchise?

RM:  We’re focused on making our Centers more efficient, giving them tools to make their business more automated and more profitable. And that frees them up to spend more time growing their business. 

It’s what eCommerce is for us and that kind of goes into something that we’ve been beta testing with Aleyant, which is their PDF2Press product due in February. We see PDF2Press as a key piece of the back-end of Presserro’s front-end. So, eCommerce is the front of the house and PDF2Press is the back. You receive files from your customers and you can be sure they come to you fully cleaned up and ready to rock’n’roll. And, for users of Pressero already, PDF2Press will be a no brainer. 

For us, there are three main selling points when it comes to getting PDF2Press out in front of our Franchise Members, the first is that it's cloud-based. A lot of the competing solutions require you to spin up servers or buy multiple computers. So it's a roadblock right there. The fact that PDF2Press is SaaS and we can spin it up with a snap of a finger is going to be huge. 

Second is that it’s affordable. Many other solutions are thousands of dollars with potentially huge set-up costs. PDF2Press is a lot more affordable. And third is the UI/UX — we really like the overall user experience. It’s pretty simple and for people using Pressero they're already used to the interface. They don't have to learn another system. So those three things for us are pretty big reasons why we’re excited about PDF2Press.

Aleyant: Thanks so much Ryan, we really appreciate your time!