In the 12 years since Gareth Robertson set up Design Pit, the multi-disciplinary graphic design business has seen challenges and changes including Brexit and the global Covid pandemic, but has always remained true to its guiding philosophy – helping businesses to be seen, heard and remembered with powerful design that tells their unique story.
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It’s an approach that resonates with Design Pit’s client base, which includes the NHS, the UK government’s Trade Remedies Authority, collaboration platform Monday.com and global insurance company Howden. However, what really sets Design Pit apart is the ability to seamlessly integrate print production into its design offering to clients, an ability that is enabled by VB Media’s e-commerce platform.
Like those of his clients, Robertson’s own story is unique. Describing himself as an atypical designer who drives a pickup truck and lifts weights, he started Design Pit from his parents’ spare room in the West Midlands after returning from travelling in 2012. His business grew quickly and by 2016 Design Pit was a team of five. When the uncertainty following the Brexit referendum result began to impact on marketing budgets, however, the impact on the business’ turnover was substantial and he was forced to scale back the size of his team. 2020 brought further challenges with the onset of the Covid pandemic and a relocation, but it also brought opportunities in the form of the online print shop that is now a core part of Design Pit’s service offering.
When direct mail delivers
Thinking back to how Design Pit came to work with VB Media, Robertson explains that he has been designing for print throughout his career. “Print is something I’ve always known,” he says. “I know print, I understand it and I’d like to think I’m good at it because my print suppliers have always enjoyed working with me. Even though I’m a designer first, I’ve always had one foot in that world. I’ve been brokering print for years, but it is a time consuming process, so for many years I’d been looking for a print shop in a box that I could put online.”
What Robertson wanted to do was set up a simple reordering system to make it quick and easy for Design Pit clients to reorder printed products such as business cards via the website, but despite an extensive search he’d never found a solution that met his needs. Then one day in late 2019, a brochure arrived in the post that changed everything. “It was from VB Media,” says Robertson, “and when I looked at it I thought: this is what I’ve been searching for, this is exactly what I need.”
VB Media is an e-commerce platform for the print industry, developed to help businesses establish an online presence to sell print without a big investment. The platform serves printers, designers, and copy-shops across the UK, enabling users to create B2B, B2C, trade sites, and private storefronts, as well as to seamlessly integrate with some of the UK’s largest trade print suppliers to fulfil orders.
“Exactly what I need”
Setting up his web shop with VB Media four years ago was “mega easy” according to Robertson: “There’s nothing else to say other than that they were superb. They got it set up in next to no time without me having to do much more than sending them a logo and a little bit of text.”
After an onboarding call to walk through the back-end of the system, Design Pit’s online print shop was populated with prices, integrated with supplier offerings and ready to go. Even more importantly, Robertson was confident using the system. “The VB Media system is really easy to use,” he says, before going on to explain how simple it is for him to set up a new category of products or services. “I’m definitely not a developer,” he says, “so if I can do it, anyone can do it, it’s just a question of having the confidence to learn.”
Asked whether he’s encountered any challenges with the VB Media system in the four years since he first began using it, Robertson says that he hasn’t. “Even if something does feel like a challenge,” he adds, “within fifteen minutes of submitting a support request, I’ve got an answer. And if they don’t have an answer right away, I’ll still get a reply saying ‘we’re not sure, but let us get back to you tomorrow’. And then they do.”
Reaching out to the VB Media team is something that Robertson says he does a lot because he’s always looking for ways to improve his website: “I’m always going to them asking ‘could I do this’ or ‘could the website do that’.”
Gavin De Boos, Director, VB Media expands on this, explaining that one of the reasons Robertson has had so much success with the VB Media platform is that he approached it with an open mind: “From the beginning Gareth has been open to how the system works and he has looked for ways to use that to his advantage.”
Print as a USP
Initially Robertson didn’t use the online print shop as much as he’d thought he would. He’d set it up in February 2020 and a month later the pandemic hit, forcing him to focus more on digital design work for clients in the health sector.
The following year, however, he decided to give his online print shop the attention he knew it deserved and doing so has not only opened up opportunities; it has helped him to identify Design Pit’s true unique selling proposition.
Robertson explains that when he first set the VB Media website up, he decided to brand it separately because he’d intended it to be a division of the business. Four years on, however, he has had so much success with the website that he has rolled his print-specific brand back into the business: “The VB Media website enables me to seamlessly offer print online with a user-friendly quoting system, control over the process and really top quality supply of print. That is the USP for my design business. It was always supposed to be a division of the business, but actually it is what sets us apart – we offer production. We don’t do it in-house, of course, but we do it well. That means that we can come up with the strategy for your brand, we can do the design and then we can go away and get that produced for you.”
Because design work can be somewhat intangible, adds Robertson, having physical print products to sell also opens up opportunities to build relationships with new clients or develop existing client relationships. He cites the example of encountering a brand he’d love to work with, but which he knows has a longstanding relationship with another designer: “I respect those relationships, but with the VB Media website, where previously I may have had to walk away, now I can offer to produce the work for them after their incumbent designer has done the artwork.”
Unexpected benefits
Since Design Pit began using it ‘properly’, as Robertson puts it, as much as a third of the business’ revenue has been print-based work transacted through the website. However, Robertson expects this to increase now that he has combined his two brands and also has a growing number of purchasable designs in his website ‘design shop’.
One of the key benefits of the system for users, as he sees it, is its flexibility. “I can put anything on there, such as customisable logos or design clinics, and transact through the website,” he says. “As long as there’s an API code, you could plug in a store to sell nuts and bolts if you really wanted to, it’s that easy to do.”
Behind the scenes, of course, there is a lot of work that goes into integrating an external service into a website using an API (or Application Programming Interface), a process which enables the website to ‘plug in’ a third-party service’s functionalities, including fetching and displaying products and processing transactions. With the VB Media system however, the process of choosing the right API, obtaining access, understanding its endpoints and data formats, testing and deployment is made far simpler by the company’s extensive network of partnerships.
“The website just becomes your system to process a transaction,” says Robertson, and this aspect of the system is something that he projects Design Pit will be using more and more as the business continues to grow. For example, the business has shifted from offering 30-day payment terms to a payment-on-order model, something that he says has been made much easier by the VB Media system’s quote-building feature. “Because you’re online,” he explains, “it’s really easy to send customers a quote that they can accept and pay right away. The quote system is so easy to use. I can build a quote in minutes, with lots of different things in it, and then I just click send and I’m done. There’s no need for me to generate an invoice and spend ages chasing payment.”
“It’s up to you to use it to create a solution”
Robertson attributes a lot of Design Pit’s success with the platform to his having what he describes as “one foot in the world of marketing and the other in production”. He explains: “I understand that a website is a tool, it’s not a solution. It is only ever as strong as its content, so I put thought, time and effort into good content to create good pages.”
“You cannot expect to launch a website and suddenly get 50,000 sales in a year,” he adds. “You can’t expect it to start selling instantly, it just won’t happen. You’ve got to push people to it, you have to get your content right, you have to have a blog strategy… Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t got all of these in place, but I do push people to the website a lot because I make sure that the products and the content looks good, so I’m confident sharing the links and to direct people to it through social media and other channels.”
De Boos echoes this, citing all of the work Robertson does to promote the Design Pit website as the fundamental to its success. “He hasn’t just let it sit there. He’s constantly working at it and doing things like participating in local trade shows to get it out there.”
Robertson says that this is because a website is never finished, only ready to go live. “But as soon as it’s live,” he continues, “it is going out of date because you’ve got to start thinking about the next iteration, the next piece of content, the next update, the next enhancement to your portfolio. I’m always thinking about how I can use this website to put me in front of the right people or a new set of people that might want to buy from me.”
Robertson thinks that is something that many businesses miss: “Just because you have a really good website system does not mean that you’ll make sales. The VB Media website system is a fantastic tool, but it isn’t a solution. It’s up to you to use it to create a solution.”
