Delightful Gift Cards
I’m Chris Guy, Lead Developer at Bloom & Wild and I’d like to share the work that we have done to improve our customer gift cards.
Our Existing Gift Cards
At each of our suppliers we have large industrial printers. These print out A5 cards which are included in each box of flowers or plants, so that the recipient knows who has gifted them.
The gift cards have a nice colour image on the front, a message for the recipient (for example “Happy Mother’s Day!”) and some information on the reverse including the order number and our logo.
On the inside of the front cover we also print our peel-off shipping label, which makes for a very easy operational process in our warehouse — grab a card, peel off the label and stick it on the box, then insert the card into said box and voila — the bouquet is ready to ship.
However, there one very big drawback to having a peel-off label on the card — the A5 media plus the thickness of the label has to be able to go through our printers; in order to keep the printer from jamming the card has to be quite thin.
Having relatively thin gift cards is a bit of a drawback for the customer experience as it does not give the card a very premium feel, and a living room door opened too quickly may well cause that card to fall off the mantlepiece!
So, What’s the Solution?
We print a lot of gift cards and send out a lot of deliveries every day. Any solution needs to operate at scale and not significantly affect our operational efficiency. As a result we spent time over the last year working on and refining a solution to separate the label from the card, which will allow us to print on nice thick, premium card instead.
The solution we came up with involves printing the label using Zebra printers on the factory line, which are connected to a device over USB. The device also connects via USB to a fixed barcode scanner and we have developed our own application to print our shipping labels.
Instead of having the shipping label on the gift card, we have added a QR code to the back page of the card which is encoded with a unique identifier for each delivery.
On the factory floor at a labelling station, the QR code is scanned and the label is fetched from our system and sent to the Zebra printer. Each label takes just a couple of seconds to print after scanning. The label is automatically detached from the backing sheet, so our labeller can just pluck the label from the printer and stick it straight on the box.
Here’s a lovely picture of our new cards:
Teething Issues
We have been through quite a few iterations of testing and these are some of the main issues we have dealt with along the way:
- Accuracy of scanning: Different scanners have different levels of accuracy. When dealing with high volumes (and QR Codes!) make sure to invest in decent scanners. Scanners with poor accuracy will increase the time to process deliveries.
- Stickiness: We had to try many different types of shipping label before we found one that will satisfy our use case — We often label our boxes and put them back into cold storage to keep our flowers as fresh as possible. We had to find labels with glue that could deal with the cold temperatures.
- Printer Jams: Using thicker card equals more printer jams. We get really busy at certain times of the year and printer jams are bad news. To combat this we had to switch from printing on A5 cards to using SRA3 sheets of card with 4 A5 cards per sheet. Our printers handle SRA3 much better than A5 which means we can print with the same level of reliability on thicker card. We then had to invest in a machine to cut & crease these sheets into separate cards. As this machine outputs into 2 trays we also had to come up with a new sorting algorithm to put the cards in the right order :)
Summary
It has been an interesting journey and we have learned a lot along the way (ZPL for one) and we are finally switching to our new solution next week. This is really exciting as it improves the experience for our customers and the difference in quality is very noticeable indeed.
