Printful

After creating several e-commerce stores themselves, Charlotte-based Printful realized that there isn’t one great drop shipping service that could take care of all their needs, in terms of creating high-quality products, arranging the shipment process, and having a simple, elegant API integration. So, they learned how to do it themselves! And they do more than printing and shipping. Printful’s 30+ developers are always working on new tech that makes running stores easier.

Currently, they’re a 375-person team (although we fully expect to see this number grow) spread out across three locations: North Carolina, California, and Latvia. (Psst, they’re one of the only print-on-demand drop shippers located in both North America and Europe).

Like most growing business, expansion offered some challenges for Printful.

As Printful grew, they hired more customer service representatives, designers, and office staff, but were running out of space. Because they experienced such fast growth, their current manufacturing facility didn’t have enough office space to accommodate all their new employees. When faced with this obstacle, their team asked, is it more valuable to spend resources to build out their current, leased facility, or explore options that would allow them to move their space to future manufacturing facilities?

The problems with option one were clear: when they move in the future, they’ll most likely require similar renovations, abandoning any investment they put into the original space. So, they decided to do something new!

They chose to utilize shipping containers for two reasons:  (1) To create a unique design story and provide a memorable office space for their flagship location and (2) provide them with the flexibility to move and reset their container offices as they continue to grow out of their manufacturing facilities.

Check out the photo album, and we think you’ll see, containers checked both of those boxes!