About Mercury Screen Printing: Trusted Team Dealer & Custom Apparel Provider
Mercury Screen Printing is a thriving screen printing business based in Albany, New York, owned and operated by industry veteran Jeff Serge. As a team dealer with a strong foothold in the local market, Mercury has built a reputation for delivering high-quality apparel and merchandise for schools, sports teams and athletic clubs, and businesses across the region.
Though Mercury has long managed the decoration and fulfillment of their OrderMyGear (OMG) online stores in-house, growing demand for quick-turn stores led Jeff to explore new fulfillment solutions. Customers are used to shopping online with major retailers and expect to receive their products fast. They don’t want to wait for a store to close so orders can be fulfilled all at once. This led Jeff and the Mercury team to use OMG’s print-on-demand solution to satisfy customers and provide Amazon-like speed.
Albany, NY |
8 |
30% |
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Location |
Years partnered with OMG |
of active stores are POD |
Overcoming Small Batch Order Obstacles with Print-on-Demand Solutions
When business is going well, it can be tough to add in new processes to operations. Bulk orders are going out, customers are happy, and the business is thriving, so, why would you change what works, right? Well, that was the exact situation facing Jeff Serge, owner of Mercury Screen Printing, when OMG President Matt Kaplan approached him to try OMG’s new print-on-demand (POD) solution in partnership with STAHLS’ Fulfill Engine.
Matt Kaplan and Jeff Serge have been friends and colleagues for numerous years. So when Matt learned that the Mercury team was fulfilling all of their orders in house—including low-quantity, quick-turn orders—he brought a new idea to the table: print-on-demand stores with OMG.
OMG is integrated with Fulfill Engine, giving businesses access to a pre-vetted network of decorators that automatically source, decorate, and ship orders on behalf of OMG clients as the orders are placed. This means hands-off decoration and fulfillment, as well as no minimums. By tapping into OMG’s POD solution, Mercury Screen Printing could satisfy more quick-turn, low-quantity orders and free up time to focus on growing their business.
Jeff was dubious at first, but after a few back and forth conversations with Matt Kaplan, Mercury decided to give OMG’s POD solution a try.
“We started getting more of these quick-turn stores and doing more small-quantity stuff. So I called Matt and said, ‘Hey, can you help me out with that? I think I’d like to try one of those POD stores.’ So we started doing it and the onboarding was super easy,” said Jeff.
After spinning up a few stores, Jeff and the entire Mercury team immediately saw the benefit. So far, everything is working as needed for Mercury, “We’ve got a big business, and when we dive into something new, we tend to start slow and as long as it works, then we just keep doing more of it…and it’s worked really well.”
Maximizing Profitability: Capitalizing on Low-Quantity Orders with POD
Historically, low-quantity orders haven’t been cost-effective or driven meaningful sales for most branded merchandise businesses. Setting up online stores only to sell a few items can be an expensive waste of time and money—but OMG’s POD solution changes all of that by outsourcing small batch orders to be fulfilled by a vetted network of decorators. This prevents the need to hold bulk inventory, as well as reduces the risk of paying for unsold inventory. This also removes the need to decorate in-house. This allows branded merchandise businesses to chase more new deals where small quantity orders can actually be profitable and easy to support.
As Jeff puts it, most branded merch businesses aren’t set up to make meaningful revenue from small-batch orders, “We can print thousands of t-shirts, and printing one t-shirt is doable, but it’s still not exactly what we’re set up to do.”
But after getting the first batch of OMG print-on-demand stores up and running, it was easy for Jeff and the entire Mercury team to see the powerful advantage in using OMG’s Fulfill Engine integration to complete low quantity orders.
“We were doing some small quick ship stuff in-house, but the Fulfill Engine team is much better at quick-ship orders, and we’re happy to have them do it because then it can free us up to do the other stuff that we do in-house that we’re really good at.”
Now that the Mercury team has deployed OMG’s POD stores, they’re able to focus their internal efforts on fulfilling large bulk orders, which is in line with their core strengths as a company.
Creating New Sales Opportunities: Saying Yes to All Order Sizes with POD
Since beginning their OMG print-on-demand journey just six months ago, Mercury has deployed 159 POD stores, which represents 30% of their current active online stores. As of today, their POD stores are driving around 27% of their total revenue, which is a significant chunk of value driven from small-batch orders.
159 |
1,100+ |
6% |
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POD stores launched in 6 months |
monthly average of POD products sold |
increase in sales on POD stores |
By making small-batch orders a profitable line item in their business, Mercury Screen Printing now has the ability to say “yes” to deals of all sizes and grow the business in exciting new ways. This includes growing sales within their current customer base.
As Jeff puts it: “With OMG’s Fulfill Engine integration, there’s a new opportunity to reach out to our current customers and say, ‘Hey, check this out. Now we can do this.’ And then for new customers, that’s just another thing we can add on and show we’re doing things that no one else can do. It’s been a no-brainer for us.”
By adding OMG’s POD stores into their operations, the Mercury team now has new core capabilities to serve more customers. They can now easily scale sales to support smaller programs, as well as offer a greater number of customizable branded merchandise SKUs to existing customers. These new capabilities have unlocked significant sales opportunities for Mercury, as well as given them a key differentiator against their competitors.
Competitive Advantage: Winning Corporate Clients with OrderMyGear
The OMG and Mercury partnership has opened up new sales opportunities without straining internal resources. This has freed up time for the Mercury team, which they’re using to grow the business.
According to Jeff, freeing up time has allowed his team to chase big corporate accounts, “We’re using the OMG Fulfill Engine stores to expand business. I’m slowly expanding into the corporate world, and I think the corporate world is really good to be in because those people have budgets and they want to consume apparel, they want to buy stuff.”
Mercury Screen Printing’s core use cases for OMG print-on-demand stores:
- Year-round stores for schools and sports teams that want products to ship as soon as an order is placed
- Corporate customers that want employees and/or their customers to be able to order branded apparel and merchandise, including restaurants and plumbing companies
- Small programs with order quantities below the normal minimum quantity requirement
The Mercury team now has a clear competitive advantage when chasing new business by being able to offer more types of products, including promotional products, and offer more products on their OMG stores without worrying about meeting minimums.
Future Growth: What’s Next for Mercury Screen Printing & Print-on-Demand
While Mercury is using OMG’s print-on-demand stores today, Jeff is most excited about the growth potential provided by being able to serve low-order customers. He specifically sees the holiday season as an opportunity to boost the number of POD stores used by Mercury and drive a significant amount of incremental sales.
“We haven’t done print-on-demand stores for a holiday season yet, but I expect the best times for using OMG’s Fulfill Engine integration are still ahead. I’m most excited to get into this fall season and see what we can really do.”
OrderMyGear: Your Partner for Branded Merchandise Business Growth
Trying something new can be tough, but it can be made much easier if your partner has a vested interest in your success. At OMG, our success is measured by the success of our clients, so we act as a technology partner to help make selling branded merchandise and promotional products easier for our clients. Supporting our clients is at the core of what we do every single day.
“OrderMyGear has been a long time partner of ours and they’re great…I couldn’t say anything bad about OMG at all because they take really good care of us, so I’m sure that we get the world’s best support.”
