One shop, every surface.
Visual Concepts designs, prints and installs for businesses across Humboldt County and beyond. In one week the shop might wrap a fleet of transit buses, screen print a wall of merch for an outdoor store, cut a storefront sign and run a few thousand stickers.
That range is the point of the shop, and it's exactly what makes software hard. A sticker run is priced by size and quantity. A shirt order is priced by the blank, the sizes, the number of colors and the number of locations. A wrap is a custom quote with an install. Every one of those jobs still has to be quoted, approved, scheduled, produced, picked up and paid.
Moving off Printavo, history and all.
The shop's years of Printavo history came along: orders, customers, payments, statuses and price matrices. The art files came too. Every mockup and art file moved off Printavo's file storage into the shop's own storage, and every order was re-linked to the new copies, so nothing depends on Printavo anymore.
Then Halftone was set up around how the shop actually works:
- Production stages for each department, so the board reads like the shop floor
- The shop's own front-office price calculator built into the quote screen, for stickers, labels, banners, signs, magnets and decals
- Live S&S Activewear prices, so reorders are priced on today's blank costs, not last year's
- Quotes and invoices sent from the shop's own Gmail, so replies land in the shop's inbox
- Card and eCheck payments through the shop's own Riverside Payments account, recorded on the order automatically
A website that actually takes orders.
The new Visual Concepts website shows off the work: case studies for whole brands they've built, from a transit system's name and bus wraps to an outdoor store's merch wall, plus a portfolio of real jobs.
It also sells. Customers can order stickers, labels, signs, magnets, banners and decals online. They upload their art, see it as the finished piece (die-cut outline, cut line and finish), pick a size and quantity, and get a real price that updates as they go. Those prices come straight from the shop's own calculator. In testing, about 15,000 random orders were run through both the website and the calculator, and every one matched to the cent.
Bigger projects go through a Work With Us form that asks the right questions up front, and customers can send files for a job straight from the site.
What it adds up to.
- Every job, from a bus wrap to a sticker run, on one board
- One price list for the counter, the quote and the website
- The shop's whole history and art in the shop's own hands
- No per-user or per-automation fees
Halftone grew out of the Visual Concepts shop floor, which is why it fits the way print shops actually work.