Everyone starts out crawling. Then we walk and later, run. Occasionally, some are able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

That single-bound talk is a bit hyperbolic, but there's no question that Ginny's Printing has, since its founding in 1971, grown to become a successful, top-shelf printer in Austin, Texas.

Similar to almost all businesses of whatever type, the printing industry has undergone broad and rapid change in the past two decades. Driven principally by technological innovation, that change remains a constant (so to speak) and Ginny's uses tried-and-true tools of the trade to provide to its customers a level of service they need to satisfy their customers.

The printing company counts Software Marketing Associates (SMA) among the important reasons its fulfillment customers keep coming back.

The Challenge

Earlier on Ginny's Printing had developed its own system to handle and manage fulfillment and, for the while, it worked fine. But as more and more customers turned to Ginny's for fulfillment that home-grown system proved wanting. Ginny's heard about Pro-Mail and gave SMA a call.

The Solution

Over the course of four months, in 2006, SMA listened carefully to what Ginny's fulfillment customers expected the printer to do for them and it provided, as it customarily does for potential customers, several suggested solutions, trying this, adapting that, tailoring Pro-Mail to meet Ginny's customers' specific needs. That cooperative back and forth between the two companies convinced Ginny's that SMA and Pro-Mail were just the ticket needed to grow its fulfillment business; it entered into a licensing agreement with SMA in July 2006.

The Results

Today, ever-changing technology, and increasing customer expectations which that technology gives rise to, demand that Ginny's fulfillment capabilities stay always current, and SMA makes certain of that. Ginny's takes smart advantage of SMA's lifetime support program and, on average, will request support from SMA four or five times monthly to resolve various smaller issues that crop up. And SMA is there to help implement big change, too.

When Ginny's fulfillment customers wanted web-to-print, SMA worked with PageDNA to make that happen. As Jeff Campbell, Ginny's director of e-commerce and major accounts executive, explained, "Pro-Mail once again did an outstanding job for us, helping with the integration with PageDNA. It was super fast and unbelievably simple to deploy." He went on, "Considering this is the most complex thing a company can offer in web-based fulfillment, I can't say enough about how impressed I am with SMA's responsiveness, and how well it worked right out of the gate."

Fulfillment today accounts for fully seven percent of Ginny's total revenue. It is the fasting growing portion of the company's overall business. Its growth spurt is due in large measure to the working relationship Ginny's has with Software Marketing Associates, an alliance that helped Ginny's to win the 2009 Austin Ad Federation's Best Fulfillment Direct Mail award.

As Ginny's Jeff Campbell says, "SMA and Pro-Mail give us the strong backbone we need to succeed." And that's as it should be. For it is, after all, precisely what Pro-Mail does for each of its more than 200 client companies: giving them a leg up, if not over tall buildings, over hurdles they face when providing seamless fulfillment programs for their customers, greasing the skids for literally thousands of distinct fulfillment programs administered every day for Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 customers, among others. That's a big job, and since 1981 Pro-Mail has been handling it quite nicely.