Revolutionary in-line inkjetting to track Moonpig cards

Personalised Greetings Card Digital Print and Production delivered by one of the industry’s most respected direct mail companies.

Background

Moonpig required an emergency contingency supplier to handle increased production due to a reduced operation during the COVID19 pandemic. Further challenges arose as demand grew for online greetings cards during lock down, which ultimately stretched Moonpig production capacity further.

Objective

Due to Propack’s outstanding industry reputation as one of the industry’s most trusted direct mail companies, we were approached to help. Our objective was to develop and implement a fully automated receipt process for all orders, associated artwork and align production to digitally print and personalise thousands of cards per day.

This threw up a series of challenges as the sheer size of the files meant that it was too slow on our standard SFTP. So our development team built a dedicated SFTP hosted on one of our contingency servers using a direct 1GB line.

The other major challenge was that the order files were output in a specific format bespoke to Moonpig’s production facility. So we had to find a solution to adapt the file to allow us to generate an additional barcode on the reverse of each card, which linked to a data string output on to the envelope to ensure the correct card and address were matched.

We have successfully developed an API and workflow linked directly to Royal Mail’s database. This allows us to generate and print live Tracked24 barcoded label images direct to outer envelopes. A fully inline process.

Results

As one of the UK’s leading direct mail companies, we always set the bar high – and within four days we had implemented the full process and commenced production, a process, when taking into account the personalised greetings card digital print, that can often take several weeks to implement.

Following a highly successful test, we are now producing thousands of orders per day of the highest quality personalised print, combining 100% match verification, and automated pack completion verification uploaded directly back to Moonpig.