Bagelstein delivers healthy food in a fun environment with Aleyant Pressero™ Web-to-Print

Company Background

Founded in 2011 with a single restaurant in Strasbourg, France, Bagelstein specializes in delivering healthy food in a fun environment. Founded by two entrepreneurs, the business expanded to three restaurants and in excess of €1 million in revenues in its first year. After attending the Franchise Exposition in Paris in 2012, Bagelstein rapidly began adding franchise stores and has grown to 45 restaurants across France and one in Luxembourg, with plans to more than double the number of stores by the end of 2016 with expansion within France and internationally.

Challenge

While baking delicious bagels is the heart of the Bagelstein franchise business, the ability to provide store managers with high quality, timely printed materials is almost as important to the company’s success. “We needed to find a way to speed up creation and delivery of flyers, menus and other printed materials which were being created manually and often had lead times of as much as a month,” said Thomas Hiebler, Communications Manager for Bagelstein.

Solution

Hiebler reports that the company investigated a number of web-to-print approaches to solve this problem. “Most we looked at,” he says, “were tied to a specific printer, and we needed more flexibility in choosing printers based on a variety of requirements, including turnaround times and geographic location. We chose Aleyant Pressero with eDocBuilder because it gave us a robust, printerindependent solution that allowed us to automate ordering and approvals, dramatically speeding up order delivery times and significantly improving quality.

The Bagelstein Story

The first Bagelstein restaurant opened in Strasbourg in 2011. To add fun to the business, the pair also invented the Bagelstein Family Tree, demonstrating how this fictional family came to invent the bagel and serve it up in various configurations in Bagelstein restaurants. This approach, and the great food the restaurant delivered, so captured the hearts and minds of the community that two more shops were opened in the first year, driving annual revenues in excess of 1 million Euro. In March of 2012, Bagelstein participated in the Franchise Exhibition in Paris and walked away with 600 leads. “This was a huge turning point in the business,” Hiebler comments, “and has resulted in our building a thriving franchise network. The first franchise was opened in Paris in September of 2012, and the network now consists of 45 shops across France with one in Luxembourg.

Unparalleled Growth: A Few Headaches

This amazing growth did not come without its headaches, however. Key among those was the need to provide restaurants with printed materials to support the business, including flyers, menus, labels, business cards, signs and more. Hiebler explains that ordering these items was a completely manual process. “A manager would request, for example, a flyer,” he says. “Our outstanding design team would get to work, designing the flyer on a one-off basis. Because of our heavy workload due to demand for printed materials from all of our stores, however, it could take as much as a month for managers to receive requested materials. This was a huge bottleneck that needed to be addressed.” The Bagelstein team set out to find a solution and discovered web-to-print. “We knew this would be the answer for us,” Hiebler remarks, “but most of the solutions we found were tied to a single printer. We needed something that we could implement ourselves so that we would have flexibility to choose different printers based on the specific needs of a job. Especially with future international expansion plans in mind, tying ourselves to a single printing firm simply did not make sense.” That’s when Bagelstein discovered Aleyant Pressero, an affordable and easy-to-use cloud-based B2B or B2C online storefront solution that can quickly and easily be customized to individual client needs. It also included Aleyant eDocBuilder, a web-based variable data publishing system built specifically to easily integrate into Aleyant or third-party web-to-print or MIS solutions and featuring advanced typography control, imposition, scripting support, PDF workflows, rapid template creation, Excel merge capabilities and more. “We believed Pressero would be the best medicine for our headaches,” Hiebler says, “and that is certainly proving to be true.”

Local Flexibility, Central Control

Once the Aleyant decision was made, the next step for Bagelstein was to create a web portal that would enable managers to place orders online for a wide variety of materials. “In addition to the convenience of online ordering,” Hiebler says, “we wanted to build optimized templates that managers could use as a base for document creation, giving them local flexibility but guarding our brand integrity. We also needed to automate the approval process to speed orders through the system. Pressero with eDocBuilder allows us to do that.”

Life-Changing!

Hiebler exclaims, “Aleyant Pressero with eDocBuilder will change our lives! We are taking our time launching the platform because we want to introduce it to our community with everything fully tested and ready to go, but we can already see the benefits we will achieve.” The new workflow will allow managers to enter online orders for a variety of materials. In some cases they merely select the item, specify the quantity and send it for approval and printing. In other cases, managers will customize pieces, including merging an Excel pricing spreadsheet into the job to accommodate local and specialized pricing. Online proofs are immediately presented for manager approval, and the job is sent for approval, with email notifications to appropriate stakeholders. “This completely eliminates any involvement of our design staff,” Hiebler says, “as well as the need to manually send a PDF proof to the requester for approval. Once the job is approved it is sent immediately for print. That means managers receive their materials in days, not weeks, and our design staff will now be free to focus on broader communication and campaign needs.” Hiebler also points out that this streamlined and automated process, in addition to taking significant time and cost out of the workflow, also eliminates errors. “Managers are responsible for entering their own information,” he says, “and for checking that it is accurate before submitting the job for approval. The second level approver stage is a final check that printing requests are authorized and error-free.”

Great Support

The Bagelstein team also appreciates the support it receives from Jose Nieto, Aleyant’s local representative. “This was all new to us,” Hiebler says, “and Jose was very helpful in getting us started and making sure we could use the solution to its fullest advantage. We are looking forward to a successful launch of this outstanding solution to our network, removing a huge headache, improving services to our franchisees, and paving the way for continued accelerated growth. Without Aleyant Pressero, I don’t believe we would be able to successfully undertake the rapid expansion plans we now have in place. It is truly a game-changer for us.”

Download the Bagelstein case study
Download the Bagelstein case study (French version)