Printo – the one-stop printing store at Bangalore

[Image above: Printo's flagship store in Koramangala, Bangalore]

The nice-looking (good logo) store in Koramangala with an aptly named printo (simple and well communicating name) aroused my curiosity to check-out what the store was all about. On entering the store, I was quite impressed by the BPO kindoff ambiance (with youngsters) behind the counter on their respective terminals. Anyways, my excuse to be there was a simple color printout for a project report. I was totally surprised when the sales person brought up a form on the terminal and started filling up an online form where she needed to fill my name and contact details (whhyyy.. I just needed a simple single print). Then I was given a choice of paper size (reasonable question) and various paper types (which reminded me of selecting a Cappuccino, Macchiato, Chococinno or Espresso at a coffee day). When I asked for the price, I was told she would have to look it up (how tough is it to remember that ??). On enquiring, I was told that the price varied with the number of pages (ah !! that way). Then, she fired the print and it took about 10 mins for the printer to warm up before it printed out my precious page. The quality was very good actually, no complaints there. Then it was time for the billing and I thought, there would be no more surprises. But like true printing professionals, the lady pulled out an adobe software for the bill and kinda checked it for something (alignment/formatting maybe) and fired a print.

It was quite a first experience, but a look around made me realize that this is a store for more specialized needs (like to print business cards, invitation cards, greeting cards, calendars, photo albums, stickers, certificates, brochures, annual reports, presentations, training manuals and posters). Woww.. quite an offering. This place must be heaven for people who are into personalized stuff like calendars with your friend’s photos, stickers for your sports teams, personalized festival greeting cards etc.. Maybe, this will catch up with the general public and corporates. But definitely not for a regular single-page printout

A look at their website printo.in throws up more surprises.

Look at the board members:

Sridar Iyengar
President, TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) & Ex-CEO, KPMG;
Currently serves on the boards of ICICI, Rediff and Infosys, among others.

Pravin Gandhi
Co-founder Hinditron & Partner, Infinity Ventures & Seed Fund;
Also serves on the boards of Mindtree, Microland and a few other large IT firms.

Naresh Malhotra
CEO, Café Coffee Day (India’s largest F&B retail chain)

Raju Venkatraman
President & COO, ICICI OneSource

These entrepreneurial biggies must have come together surely after seeing a big opportunity here. The Hindu article says the Printo estimate for the domestic printing and documenting market is a whopping Rs. 15500 crores (which now lies with the largely disorganized brick and mortar printing firms). Does Printo want to pocket a big pie of this ? It surely has major plans like 200 stores by 2009 and radical new-ideas like “online document storage” and a “distribute and print” offering. Yet to see it working though.

Or on the other hand is it just a rip-off idea from US’s Kinkos (similar color combination too . Actually, nothing wrong with that, as long as they can make it work in India.

Anyways, I had to pay Rs. 20 for the single page color printout (which falls to 14, 12 and 8 with increasing number of pages)