Storybird is looking for a print, fulfillment, and customer service partner (one company, not three) that can support our print-on-demand requirements and grow with us globally.
If you rep a company that can meet our needs—or are a designer/client and buy print-on-demand and fulfillment services and have some suggested suppliers—we’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at: partners [at] storybird [dot] com
Here are some details:
The basics:
1. Storybirds are short, visual stories that live predominately online (browser, mobile). Here’s an example.
2. Our members make their stories based on narrative art that is supplied by illustrators from around the world. Here’s an artist shop.
3. Storybirds are optimized for screen playback but mindful of print requirements. Artists upload hi-res TIFFs in CMYK which we clone. The original is kept for printing; the clone is an RGB, 72dpi, browser-friendly jpg.
4. Storybirds can be any length. We place no restrictions on page count and do not optimize for saddle-stiched/paired pages. The average Storybird is 10-13 pages.
5. Storybirds are full color.
6. We deliver our print partner a hi-res PDF for any book order.
The books:
7. Storybirds are designed in a horizontal format that measures 10.5 x 7.5 inches (266.7 x 190.5 mm). We’d like to create a second offer that’s twice that size.
8. We’d like both sizes available in softcover, hardcover, and a premium format. The premium format will be distinguished by a heavier cover stock, cloth binding, premium paper, and endcovers.
9. We’d like to explore board books for infants. These aren’t part of an initial offering but on our radar. (Other “art-enabled” products will follow, from art cards and small posters to stickers and puzzles. It’s preferable if your network can accommodate this range.)
10. Options for acid-free and recycled paper, vegetable-based inks, etc need to be explored in our prototyping. We want to minimize our waste footprint and offer a product that is chemically-free as possible.
The business:
11. We plan to order 2,500-5,000 books over our first 12 months. Estimate that 70% of these are one-offs, 20% are 2-10 copies, and 10% are 10+. Expect volume to triple in another 12 months. By year three, we expect to be shipping 100k books worldwide.
12. Estimate that 50-60% of our books ship within North America; 20-30% to Australia, South America, and Europe; and the remaining batch to India, Asia, and “anywhere else.” That said, we won’t really know shipping patterns until after the first 6 months of orders since online usage won’t reflect gifting/ordering locations.
13. We need our partner to manage printing, shipping, and fulfillment-based customer service. We’ll need some level of data exchange and accounting in both directions: our order handoff and files; your metrics for speed, quality, complaints, etc.
14. We expect some level of upfront investment from our partner in helping prototype our formats and pricing and ironing out the kinks in the system.
15. Our partner evaluation will be based on a) product quality, b) fulfillment reliability, and c) customer service. Being honest, kind, and interested in our business gets you a 2x level up/gold coin/Mario moment.
