#PrintChat Profile: Slava Apel
Q1: Who are you, and what do you do?
Slava Apel, CEO of Amazing Print Tech, a 15+ year web2print technology company. We serve thousands of printers, print brokers and sign shops with online design and online ordering technologies. I also do a lot of marketing webinars for those that are using our software so they can be even more profitable. In short… I love helping businesses make money using http://www.amazingprint.com as my home base.
Q2: When did you know you were hooked on print?
About 20 years ago I used to own a design agency and used to go to a printer’s place for press-checks. I used to visit the printer sometimes 3 times per day and drove 30 minutes each way to get it done. I liked the print business, but I thought a lot of my travelling back and forth could be eliminated with online proofing, online collaboration and online commerce. Since 1997, I set on a path to help the print industry streamline the upfront processes that took too much time, and came up with our version of web-to-print right then. Being around printers, and seeing so many variations of ink (and later on toner) on paper, I got hooked on this industry.
Q3: What industry trends should we be watching this year?
Web to Print is my passion, so watching it grow along with the emerging technologies of personalisation or VDP, Purls, AR, RFID, Near Field and tying it all around proper marketing is exciting to watch.
Q4: What are three resources for awesome industry info – besides PrintMediaCentr of course!
Just 3?!?!? I subscribe to 40! The biggest one for me are the three aggregators like google alerts, twitter and LinkedIn that pull in a lot of information that is being found on top print and graphics and marketing resources. Since I write for a few publications, it wouldn’t be fair to single them out.
Q5: Why do you #PrintChat? Why should others join in?
PrintChatters have great humor, they don’t pull punches if someone is wrong or self-promoting and they come up with 20 different answers for the same question. You don’t get this type of communication on LinkedIn and other resources. The moderators are pretty good too. Every week you can learn in 1 hour something new that will help your business, and you don’t have to travel to achieve that.
Q6: How can people connect with you?
Chat with me during Printchat.
Chat with me through our w2p corporate site at http://www.amazingprint.com
LinkedIn company at https://www.linkedin.com/company/amazing-print-corp
LinkedIn personal at https://ca.linkedin.com/in/webtoprint
Twitter company at https://twitter.com/AmazingPrint
Twitter personal at https://twitter.com/SlavaApel
Or… In this digital world, just call me at 905-738-9920
I look forward to getting to know you!
