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In Conversation With...
The Green Machine
Below: FujiFilm’s Jonathan Difford (second left) with Scribbler’s (left-right) Tom Procter, John Byrne, Aisling Crosland and Andrew Webb. from the Scribbler kiosk.
With echoes of a Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory experience, having received their ‘exclusive invite’, a constant stream of leading retailers, leisure operators, educational establishments, shopping centre landlords and corporate business, were granted access through the mysterious doors of the Innovation Hub at FujiFilm’s impressive House of Photography in London’s Covent Garden. PG joined the queue to have a first glimpse of the brand new Scribbler greeting card print on demand kiosk that has been developed in conjunction with the leading technology print maestros. Scribbler is well known and revered for doing things a little bit differently. While it has less than 40 retail stores it has always punched above its weight in terms of consumer awareness, working hard to safeguard its reputation for offering a pithy selection of edgy, on-trend cards and gifts both from its bricks and mortar presence and online platform with constant refreshments and innovative marketing. Added to this of course is the agility it has shown in gaining an audience with other retailers, inaugurally Sainsbury’s, seeing
merit in expanding the reach of its design capabilities by taking it into other enclaves of the retail landscape. Plus its move to licensing designs from publishers and designers for its online activities as well as taking some of these designs into its stores on the same basis, with printing and shipping straight to branch, further indicates its penchant for challenging conventions. There had been murmurs for some time that the retail group was working on its next
Left: Scribbler’s head of design Aisling Crosland at the new kiosk. Above: Cards by Angela Chick and Quite Good Cards that are just two of the hundreds of designs available from the Scribbler kiosk.
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PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
disruptive move, and some of that was revealed last month. In what it sees as taking print on demand to a whole new level is the launch of its first instant greeting card kiosk, developed in partnership with photographic print pioneers FujiFilm. “We’re hugely excited to be working with FujiFilm, the Rolls-Royce of this technology, as well as our partner designers to launch what is effectively, a Scribbler store in a box,” summed up Scribbler’s co-founder John Procter breaking the news. Adding what the tie-up brings to the Scribbler party, John Byrne, chief operations officer at the retail company said: “The kiosk enables the Scribbler brand to scale up and be present in places we would not otherwise have a presence.” Combining the state-of-the art printing technology from FujiFilm with the immense