Opening Event, Office Impressions and our Mission Statement

4797 views since January 26, 2016

We are so proud that we moved into our new office last fall, we are absolutely in love with it and working there is a whole other experience and much more fun. Now we have a lot of space for our photography as well as our printing business and with this blog post we want to show you some impressions of our new office created at the day of our opening event at the end of 2015. We also want to deliver insight into the reasons for this wonderful new office, because of our photography business it would not have been necessary, of course it would have been great but not necessary in this dimension. So check out the details of this blog post to read more about our mission statement Quality is the one value that always pays off and our development in the printing section of our business.

PS: Within the next weeks we will also publish some wide angle shots of our new office so you can get an overview how it looks like.

Quality is the one value that always pays off - a nice quote with a lot of truth in it that accompanies us for quite a while. When we started the year 2015 we did not really expect too many major changes in our business life. Everything developed just fine and we were happy with the situation. But then one thing led to another and today we look back stunned what we achieved in such a short amount of time. Here is the story about it:

As some of you might know we are not only into photography but since a couple of years we also run an online-plattform for customized greeting-cards like wedding invitations, thank-you-cards, baby-cards and stuff like that called Dankeskarte.com. The business in this field developed nicely so at the beginning of 2015 we run three fine-art printers to work off all the orders that came in. It was in March when we discussed how we could further develop our service and soon we thought about buying a laser-cutting machine which would allow us to produce individual, very detailed and cool looking paper cut and glass products. It was this discussion that caused to recalculate and rethink the whole project and we finally were faced with the question which printing technology could lower our costs and maximise our productivity. Another question was what it would take to change our current service, where we do all the designing for our clients, to a workflow where the clients could do this right in the browser and we would only need to print the final product - at least most of the time. Thanks to our experience in the field of software development and our contacts we managed it to find the right partners for our requirements with laser-cutting, printing and with a new online-solution for our printing service.

A major downside of all these thoughts, besides a 6-figure investment, was the space needed for the new equipment. Only the new printing machine - a brand new model with incomparable printing quality and the first installation in Austria - itself would be more than 5m long. So besides creating a concept for the new website and working with the development team to get this piece of the puzzle right we now also had to find a new office for our complete business. Thankfully the search did not take long and we found and fell in love with a space that we call The Penthouse from the first sight. It took us only two weeks from the first viewing of the empty space, planning rooms, installations, working spaces, etc. to the final lease agreement. After only 8 weeks the empty building shell had transformed into our new office and we had to conquer a new challenge: moving an in production online-business without having anyone to notice anything. We printed and shipped the last packages on Friday 28th of August in our old office, then moved all the printing and postproduction equipment, the working spaces, Macs, Storages, Server, etc. to the new office and after a hard weekend we printed and shipped the first packages from our new office on Monday.

The next week the new printing machine was installed and we could start to adjust to the new workflow. We can tell you, this road was long and full of obstacles, as we are very ambitious in terms of printing quality and color accuracy - some would even say picky. So it took a couple of weeks until the machine did what we wanted it to do. In addition we expanded our team to handle the growing demands. From the time we switched to the new printing machine we could lower the prices just a bit and multiplied the number of orders. This led to an increase of revenue of 85% compared to the year before, mainly caused by the last view months of the year.

So in the end the quiet and steady year 2015 was not so quiet for us. It took us until November to completely finish the office and organize our grand opening event. 60 guests joined us to take a look at our new office and to present what we would be able to offer in the future. Today we are still busy, there is a lot left to do but we are only a view weeks from launching our new website for the printing business - it`s gonna be industry leading but also a hell lot of work. We will keep you updated when the relaunch of www.dankeskarte.com takes place. We hope our investment will pay off but as the quote says: Quality is the one value that always pays off so we are pretty confident. At this point we also want to say thanks to all our clients and business partners, without you it would not have been possible!

Large backlit prints and our PhotoBooth (bookable for our bridal couples).

With our new laser cutting machine we can also engrave glas so we used long drink glasses and engraved the Nina Hintringer Photography logo. These glasses look amazing, we love them!

We also create customizable gift boxes and they will be available as soon as the new printing website is online.

Small selection of our exclusive coffee-table books.

Here you can see the new printing machine on the left and the laser cutting machine on the right.

Our Epson FineArt printer is still in use and creates gorgeous canvas prints.

Some invitations, thank-you cards and cake toppers.

Lasercut cards with a wooden touch and cake toppers cut out of acryl glass. These things can be ordered soon on our new website.

Cake topper with customizable wedding date, cut out of black acryl glass.

Customizable cake topper cut out of white acryl glass with the name of the bridal couple.

Mr & Mrs cake topper

Labels for wine bottles, available soon on our new site.

Customized gift boxes in several shapes and colors will be available in our new online shop.

And finally my styling for the opening event, special thanks to Michél Schiwon - dervisagist.com - for hair and make-up as well as Markus Spatzier - Manufaktur Herzblut - for this gorgeous dress. You maybe already know this dress as I was wearing it for our couple shoot with Mike Larson in Las Vegas.