62 Business View - December 2015
ferent businesses, it sold its front-end consumer site to
focus exclusively on running a high volume, personalized
manufacturing and fulfillment operation for printed photo-
merchandise. Today, RPI is a B2B company that makes
tangible, tactile, and engaging personalized print products
both for businesses and their end users.
RPI’s major customers span from web e-commerce pro-
viders who are marketing directly to consumers to sell
their photo products, to photo-app developers, to some of
the world’s largest retailers and corporate brands. And yet
RPI also fulfills orders to individual consumers as if they
were the company’s own customers. Its core products in-
clude personalized photo books, holiday cards, wedding
invitations, themed calendars, stationery products, etc.
“So, if you were to order that product from a major retailer,
that order is transferred to us; we manufacture and fulfill
it and we ship it out as if we were that major retailer,” Bel-
lamy says. “We also service some of the world’s largest
consumer products brands with personalized marketing
materials; we directly integrate with their digital marketing
applications,” he adds.
Integrating with its client’s marketing strategies is a ma-
jor component of RPI’s business model. Bellamy explains
why: “Digital marketing is a highly effective way to market
to people, but it turns out it’s very, very fleeting. So, if I, as
a user, act on that digital marketing message immediately,
it’s highly effective – somewhere between a two and five
percent conversion rate to some sort of action. However,
if I don’t act on it immediately, it’s gone, because we’re all
flooded by a host of digital messages every day.”
He continues: “There’s a fair amount of brain research
that says when you are holding, say, a book in your hand,
the sensation of touch actually helps you retain the infor-
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