1. Automate for scalability: Nick's focus on automation at Templi has led to streamlined processes that reduce manual input, boost productivity, and support growth.
2. Align customer expectations: Managing customer satisfaction and avoiding CX issues requires ensuring customers understand the differences between printed products and on-screen designs.
3. Speed matters in CX: Prompt responses are crucial for maintaining a positive customer experience. Nick likens delays to a boiling pot—if not managed, they can lead to dissatisfaction.
4. Leverage technology and AI: Nick uses advanced technologies, including AI, to streamline the complex print production process, enhancing both speed and quality.
5. Design-centric approach: Recognizing that today’s gatekeepers are creatives, Templi prioritizes simplifying production for designers, enabling them to easily create high-quality custom products.
Nick O'Brien has turned his family's modest printing history into a thriving platform that enables artists to realize their visions! He is rewriting the norms of the printing business with a drive for efficiency and automation, enabling firms to express themselves through personalized items more easily than ever.
Meet Nick, Founder and CEO of Templi!
Templi is the newest print and merch site for creatives and brands, customizing a range of items from cups to matches and coasters. In addition to customizable items for fun events, they have a strong focus on automating the reordering process for companies and hyper streamlining the supply chain of branded supplies.
Growing up, Nick’s family had a small printing business. Back then, he wasn’t really interested in joining the printing industry, but his opinion soon changed when he began working with designers, boutique hotels, and creatives in New York City. His work at this time sparked his interest in printing as he fell in love with the industry because he was able to work with up-and-coming, trendy businesses.
Nick moved to China to work with bigger print packaging orders. As he learned more about the industry, he realized that in the US, printing companies serve as the middleman, but international printing companies are able to produce large orders exclusively.
While Nick lived in China, he was able to immerse himself into printing production. He learned all about the printing process, how to run a factory, and the culture within the industry.
“I guess what I learned through the process is [that] maybe I wasn’t the right entrepreneur at the time, but a business didn’t feel very scalable because every order was a custom quote and everything needed to be checked,” he explains. “It didn’t feel like [the process] could be streamlined and automated, and my whole career, I’ve been obsessed with business automation [and] improving processes.”
Two years later, Nick left China on a mission to create a business that would scale the printing process and leverage its efficiency. As he studied the production process, Nick noticed three main “aha moments,” as he describes them.
First, although prints are difficult to produce en masse, there’s a window of opportunity to improve the customer experience aspect for not only the customer, but also for the designers.
His second realization was that it’s very time-intensive for designers to source their print products. Because of this, Nick wanted to create a resource that would allow them to hand off their designs for production, which would take some of the stress off of them during the printing process.
Third, Nick discovered that over the past few years, creatives have become the gatekeepers of the printing industry because people are more attracted to design and aesthetics. There’s a lot of opportunity to create a platform that serves both the designers and customers to bridge the interests of the printing industry. From these realizations, Templi was born.
“If we could take care of designers and customers [and fulfill] that creative production… I thought that [the opportunity] was really wide open from there with the potential for the business,” he says.
Templi offers a wide range of products on which customers can print their custom photos and logos. When determining his company’s offerings, he was inspired by the modern art museum gift shop. Although some general stores and gift shops’ products are tacky and by the book, art museums produce creative items that visitors can purchase. Through his company, Nick wanted to create a space for creative people that takes away the complexity of the industry, and simplifies the production process instead.
“[It’s] what we want to bring to the world for online shoppers,” he says. “I want to bring a modern vibe to this industry and be an outlet for creatives… We just try to make things as simple as humanly possible and bring those creative items to the forefront.”
Templi is primarily a B2B business, but Nick wants to expand and work more with customers because he understands that expressing yourself through something physical can be fun. He looks back to the time when he and his family designed cups for his daughter’s first birthday. Every so often, he sees the cup in the kitchen and he remembers how much fun he and his loved ones had celebrating his daughter. These customized products can create a memory that people will look back onto fondly.
“I think there’s a lot of room for people who identify as a personal brand now. Even if they’re not an influencer, they still want to add some fun,” Nick says about Templi’s future B2C growth.
The company’s typical customer is a trendy, new restaurant, hotel, bakery, or café — essentially, a physical storefront where its owners can interact with customers and provide a fun keepsake for them.
“If you open a shop, retail store, or anything physical where you’re interacting with a customer, there’s probably something really fun on Templi for you where you can add your logo to it [and] have a high-quality representation of your brand,” he says. “[It’s important] to have that interaction or takeaway for your customers.”
The company is composed of ten people, of which a few work in-house and 70% are remote and clock in from all over the world.
Primarily, the team uses Gorgias, a CRM platform that has helped the team become more streamlined. They also use Notion, Slack, among other platforms.
Templi also has a team of graphic designers on staff in addition to a third-party team that completes time-intensive projects. There are a lot of things that happen behind the scenes in the printing industry that usually go under-appreciated, Nick explains. For instance, the company’s third-party team vectorizes logos so they can print seamlessly onto any product. If it weren’t for those employees, customers’ logos would be blurry and low-quality, which could result in a poor customer experience.
The company also uses AI and other platforms to help with these tasks.
“Our job is to be on the bleeding edge of technology and AI [to improve the process] and make it less time-intensive every single day,” he says. “[We have] to be as innovative as we can and reduce human input as much as possible.
When it comes to e-commerce, Nick explains that Templi exists in a space where the chance for a bad customer experience is higher than other companies within the industry. Because of this the company has to be very meticulous and meet the customer’s requests in each custom order.
Another challenge that Nick sees from day to day is that it can be difficult to work with customers’ expectations compared to the reality of the product. There’s more variance when looking at a design on the screen and seeing how it prints in reality.
“Our biggest task is [to] align expectations and reality,” he says, “[and] if you don’t do that, then you should expect problems [within] customer experience. We control what’s within our control.”
Due to drop-shipping businesses like Amazon, customer expectations are on a steep incline. Now, they want items that are cheaper, arrive quicker, and require less effort. Because of this, CX agents have to consider the speed of their responses to customer inquiries. Assistance has to be ready, available, and convenient at the customers’ fingertips.
“The faster we can answer people, the faster they can find things, and the more timely, the better. The customer experience will deliver,” he says.
Nick considers a bad customer experience to be when a customer has to wait an extended amount of time for a solution to their problem. In the printing industry, a productive, back-and-forth in communication is essential because it takes time to complete the production process.
To illustrate this idea, he compares CX interactions to cooking with a kettle. When the customer reaches out with their first inquiry, it’s like turning the kettle on. As they wait for a response, the water continues to boil and smoke rises higher and higher. The goal is to prevent the water from boiling over, Nick explains.
“I think in any industry, whatever service you’re selling, if you can save people time, take things off their plate, and make their lives easier, then you’re going to probably win,” he explains.
Gorgias
Slack
Notion
Most Exciting Thing about E-Commerce: There are so many different aspects of the field and the best practices are well-documented. It’s a great opportunity to learn! “[In the field, you can learn] about all these different areas [like] SEO and conversion rates and become better at these things. I try to learn every single day [by carving] out half an hour to learn something new. That’s the fun part.”
Key Hiring Trait: Nick considers two main things. First, do they have the ability to perform within the role? To assess this, you have to outline a well-defined job description, ask great questions during the interview, and create internal tests. Second, is there a high probability of them raising the standards of the team they’re joining? Consider whether the potential hire is a team player and how well they take criticism. “You want to find your A player. Are they going to fit culturally and are they going to do a great job?”
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