StartUp Beat: Featured Pitch: Earthtone

Headquarters: New York City

Year Founded: August, 2007

Founders: Nader Alaghband, founder and CEO, and David Reid, founder and CFO

Investors: Angel investors

Employees: 10

Launch date: February 10, 2009 (Northeast U.S.); October 2009 (National launch)

Company Description in 140 characters or less:
“Earthtone is an online service that connects businesses and users to a network of independently-operated print providers across the country.”

By Nader Alaghband
Earthtone developed out of a mix of personal experience and professional ambition. My colleague and friend David Reid and I came up with the idea for Earthtone a few years ago. We were trying to find a local green printer where we could have an important presentation professionally produced quickly and conveniently. We tried to search for the right supplier online, but the process was both time consuming and inefficient and we spent several fruitless hours searching through hard to comprehend pricing lists without finding what we were looking for. In the end, David and I had to resort to the yellow pages and call all the printers in the relevant section to find out what services they offered and what environmental accreditations they had.Most places wanted 24 hours just to turn around a quote—not much good to us given that we were cutting it close, time wise! We realized that there had to be a better way to get something as simple as twenty copies of a 20-page presentation, printed on 100% recycled stock, nicely bound and finished by an ISO-accredited printer.

We were surprised to find that in spite of many affordable, independent print businesses to choose from, there wasn’t any way to find them, not to mention to compare their services in one place before placing an order online. Sure, some printers had websites but they were hard to find online, and even once you did find them, they were so hard to navigate that you’d end up getting frustrated and just calling the place up, spending time on hold and finally getting a quote for something that wasn’t quite what you wanted anyway.

As members of the Internet generation, we considered that online shopping’s key benefit to us as consumers was that it empowered us to choose. With flights, books, and music, sites like Expedia and Amazon made it easy for us to find what we wanted, when we wanted.

As we looked around the printing industry, we could see that instead of being driven to modernize, it was retreating, protecting itself from change and ensuring its own decline. We tried to understand what was driving this decline and we found that the dominance of big brands stifled innovation and made it impossible for tens of thousands of smaller, independent print providers to compete for online market share.Earthtone’s global printing platform bridges the gap between discerning and choice-hungry online shoppers and risk-averse but opportunity-starved independent print providers. It has taken three years of development, half a dozen discarded concepts, countless service models and even more value propositions to develop this user-friendly solution to both problems.

Buying Prints Online
The shift to online shopping is well documented. Businesses and consumers are turning to e-commerce because they recognize that the Internet gives them convenient and efficient access to more information—allowing them to find the products and services they want—and more choice, enabling them to make better and more informed purchasing decisions.

Despite the dominant presence of a few big brands, the $12 billion quick printing industry is almost completely (90 percent) composed of smaller, locally-focused and independently operated print businesses. Without the economies of scale or the technical expertise to develop and deploy the world class online printing capabilities required to compete with the market leaders, these small businesses’ ability to attract and retain online customers has been significantly limited.

As a result, consumers and businesses who want to buy prints online have had a very limited choice of proprietary solutions to choose from. These solutions limit buyers to a single list of services while their opaque pricing is designed to inhibit buyers’ ability to compare suppliers. Sometimes you know exactly what you want and you know where to get it. For example, if you want to fly with a specific airline, you could use their proprietary site to book your tickets. More often, you want to fly at a convenient time of day, or you want the best value ticket, so you will use an aggregator like Expedia which gives you information from all the airlines in one place. We see Earthtone as the first ‘Expedia’ for print services.

Connecting Small Businesses
Earthtone’s service has two key and distinct components: one component gives locally-focused print service providers (PSPs) a free online storefront on Earthtone’s website; the second component creates a gateway for small businesses to find those local suppliers and use for their printing needs.

At a time when small businesses are under great pressure due to the worsening economic climate, Earthtone makes it easy for them to use the Internet to do more business and make better purchasing decisions. Because Earthtone only charges print providers a commission when business is transacted over the platform, they can attract new business from across the web without risking upfront investment.

And because Earthtone customers compare hundreds of independent suppliers in moments, they are more likely to find and choose the one that’s best for them.

Earthtone and the Environment
Earthtone is committed to helping buyers make environmentally more-responsible choices and to helping sellers adopt greener business practices.

-By working with Climate Care to offset the carbon-cost of prints bought on Earthtone’s platform, we contribute to sustainability on behalf of our customers;
-By helping people to buy locally, we help reduce carbon emissions associated with transportation;
-By supporting soft proofing, test printing and ‘eco-searches’, we help people minimize unnecessary or wasted prints;
-And because it’s easy to get to a local store, Earthtone customers can easily stop in if they want to talk about their order.

In addition, we are developing a number of initiatives in partnership with leading environmental organizations to help our stakeholders reduce the environmental impact of prints bought and sold on Earthtone’s platform. We will release detailed information in the near future.

Earthtone - www.earthtone.net

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Featured Pitch: Earthtone

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