Sydney mail house lands multimillion-dollar deal to manage real estate print

Active Mail has booked $200,000 of work in three months since winning a five-year web-to-print contract with a real estate multinational.

Luke Pearsall, general manager of the Sydney-based print and mail house, told ProPrint the company had been printing business cards, brochures and notepads for 25 Australian branches since the web portal went live in January. The company had also been outsourcing orders for large-format boards, he added.

Pearsall said the contract had previously been held by a larger rival, Printforce, but his 20-staff operation had secured the work thanks to the help of software and marketing services company Chameleon Workflows.

Chameleon produced an impressive dummy website and lent support during the presentation, said Pearsall.

"The only reason we got this was because of Chameleon and the affordability and the ease-of-use and how easy it was to bed it in," he said.

Active Mail was invited to tender for the web-to-print contract because it already had a good relationship with the multinational after handling mail for the previous three years, Pearsall said.

That meant Active Mail was now "pretty much their go-to point for print management across Australia".

Pearsall told ProPrint that Active Mail would be using its newfound web-to-print capability to pitch for other big jobs. He was reluctant to provide details of prospects or target sectors for fear of alerting his competitors. However, he did reveal talks had started with one nationwide company and talks were soon to start with another.

Pearsall encouraged other printers to follow Active Mail's move into web-to-print.

"It's definitely business changing if you can embrace it," he said.

"If you get a confident person who can go and sell this product, it will change your business. If you don't diversify, I don't believe you'll survive."