About Silber Druck

Founded in 1965 and located in Lohfelden, near Kassel in central Germany, Printnow.de and Silber Druck oHG’s core business is printing magazines. The company has over 100 employees.

Printnow.de and Silber Druck oHG launched the Canva print integration in their online stores in February 2021.

The objective of the integration was to enable customers to design and prepare print-ready files using in-language templates in the Canva platform.

The Challenge

Printnow.de and Silber Druck oHG spokesperson Daniel Reitz says that the Canva integration came about in a novel way.

Reitz explains: “My brother lives in Sydney and works for Canva. When I visited him the last time, he showed me where he works now (the new Canva office) and introduced me to Cliff and Mel [Canva’s founder]. I had a coffee with Cliff, and we were talking about what I do for a living. He told me about the print shop integration and when I was back home, I told my uncle (Martin Silber, from Silber Druck) that I would like to integrate Canva in our new shop. Since I already knew Canva (because of my brother and personal use), I knew it’s potential and sent Cliff a message when our shop was ready for integration. He introduced Aaron to me – and we started.”

Canva’s Global Partnership Lead Aaron Day says, “As Canva gains popularity around the world, we are looking for strategic partners that will allow regional users to really benefit from a diverse set of templates. When Daniel first approached me, the idea of having a well-known printer in the heart of Germany who not only focused on short run digital printing, but on longer run publications and catalogs, felt like a perfect match.

“We hear from magazine publishers all over the world how much they love the ease of use of Canva and being able to integrate the power of Canva into such a respected printing organization as SilberDruck just felt like a game changer for the local publishing community. “We truly expect SilberDruck to disrupt in a very positive way how magazines are created and printed across Germany,” says Day.

The Solution

In the past, Reitz says that many customers struggled to create print-ready files. They were supplying files in the wrong format, at the wrong resolution and without crop and bleed marks.

Reitz says, “Customers ordering print products for the first time sent us a wide range of different files, from pngs, jpegs, Powerpoint presentations and Word documents with different sizes for each page and so on. Not even talking about bleed/crop. First page landscape, second portrait, stuff like that.

“My first action there was to implement a file check so that only pdfs can be uploaded. This reduced the number of wrong files (a bit), but is still a big problem.

“We’ve got a really small mark-up on our prices and sell many products for less than 10€ (shipping included). If I have to help with the data (even though I like to do that), there’s no chance to make any profit,” says Reitz.

By directing them to Canva to create and download their files, this solved the problem completely.

“So far, every single customer has been super happy and surprised by the possibilities and how easy to use it is. Even my uncle (who hates computers) loves it,” says Reitz.

Beyond fulfilling orders created online through the companies’ online stores, Reitz says that they are hoping to expand their business through the partnership.

“We definitely want to form a strong, long-term partnership. We hope to be able to not only print the products ordered through our shop – we would love to print the orders from canva.com in Germany and countries around us as well. As soon as the integration is done and we’ve got some experience with the workflow, we will launch some projects for schools. The first school is already performing a test and is really happy to give the kids a chance to work together on a project,” says Reitz.