Onlineprinters Brand Guidelines: From diedruckerei.de in Franconia to a European Print Group

A family print shop that went online.

Onlineprinters grew out of a small print shop in Neustadt an der Aisch, a town in Middle Franconia in northern Bavaria. German Wikipedia says the company developed from Druckerei und Verlag E. Meyer GmbH, an owner-run printer with a conventional business model, founded in 1984 by the typesetter Erwin Meyer. His son Walter Meyer, a trained offset printer who was by then managing director, decided to sell the shop’s printed products online, and in 2004 opened a web shop under the name diedruckerei.de, which translates as “the print shop”.

The regional newspaper Nordbayern, reporting on the company in September 2016, dated the business from that step. It wrote that Walter Meyer founded the firm in 2004 as a start-up called diedruckerei.de, and that the company was renamed Onlineprinters GmbH as it expanded abroad. At that time, the paper said, it still traded as diedruckerei.de in Germany and as Onlineprinters in more than 30 other European countries. The two accounts describe the same arrangement: an older family print works with a younger online business built on top of it.

German Wikipedia says the diedruckerei.de name reached a wider German audience through television advertising around sports broadcasts. It remained the German brand until July 2020, when sales in Germany moved under the umbrella name Onlineprinters. The original print company had already changed its name in 2019, becoming Onlineprinters Produktions GmbH, still based in Neustadt an der Aisch.

The group’s head office is in Fürth, next to Nuremberg. German Wikipedia gives Fürth as the seat of Onlineprinters GmbH, and the company’s own online magazine says its editorial team works at the Onlineprinters headquarters there. Neustadt remains the parent plant, which German Wikipedia calls the Stammhaus, and the town’s basketball team, TTV Neustadt, has played under the name Onlineprinters Neustadt/A. since 2020.

Investors, Britain and Scandinavia.

Outside investors arrived in the 2010s. Nordbayern reported in September 2016 that the private-equity firm TA Associates had been a partner of Onlineprinters since 2013, and that Bregal Unternehmerkapital was taking over all of the shares TA Associates held, so becoming the majority shareholder. Walter Meyer moved from the management into a newly created advisory board and kept a stake in the company, the paper said. Writing in March 2017, Private Equity Wire described Bregal as the majority shareholder working alongside the investor Project A and Walter Meyer.

The same Private Equity Wire report announced the group’s move into Britain. Onlineprinters was to acquire Solopress, an online printer in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, founded in 2004 and employing 225 people in 2016; the founders of Solopress were to stay on as managing directors and become shareholders in the Onlineprinters group. German Wikipedia records the purchase as made in 2017, and a later Onlineprinters press release lists Solopress as part of the group. In the same report Onlineprinters said it had produced more than 2.1 billion printed items in 2016, had welcomed its 600,000th customer in January 2017 and employed more than 650 people.

Further additions followed, according to German Wikipedia. The Scandinavian online printer LaserTryk has belonged to the group since 2017. In 2020 Onlineprinters bought RIB Industrie-Buchbinderei, a bindery in Waldbüttelbrunn near Würzburg, and the Madrid printer Copysell; since July 2021 it has sold in Spain as Onlineprinters España. A company press release on the group’s structure names the Scandinavian Print Group as the arm that runs its business in Scandinavia, and says the group means to keep producing locally in Germany, Britain and Spain, close to its customers.

France has been approached without a plant. In a press release dated September 2026, Onlineprinters said it had set up Onlineprinters France SAS and opened an office in Montpellier, in the Port Marianne district, where a four-person team has worked since the end of April with business customers and resellers. In June 2026 the company said it had again passed the on-site inspection for Imprim’Vert, a French environmental label for printers.

Design and documentation.

Online printers and print-on-demand platforms sell something the customer designs and the company makes. Their websites are therefore built around two things: the range of printed products on offer, and the steps for turning a file or an idea into an order. Product pages are organised by category — business cards, flyers and postcards, stickers and labels, signs and banners, packaging, apparel, and fabric or home goods — and each is shown through the company’s own photographs of finished pieces.

The ordering side is described in plain, practical terms. Customers either upload a finished print file or build a design in an editor that runs in the web browser, then choose size, quantity, paper and finish from a configurator. Cimpress, for example, describes its services as running from upload-and-print to logo design, with file checks before production. Papers and finishes are named rather than pictured in the abstract: weights in grams per square metre, coated or uncoated stock, matt or gloss lamination, and options such as rounded corners or spot varnish.

Behind the storefront, the companies differ in how they make things. Some run their own print plants; CEWE described SAXOPRINT’s Dresden site as a production facility when it agreed to sell it to Cimpress in May 2026. Others, such as HelloPrint in Rotterdam, describe themselves as platforms that pass orders to a network of partner printers and carriers. Several of the brands in this guide belong to larger groups, and their corporate pages set out owners, sites and the dates of takeovers.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where its products are made and how it presents itself — and attributes to the company anything that rests only on its own word.

Five thousand products, six countries.

Today Onlineprinters presents itself as a print shop for business customers. Its standard company description, printed at the foot of its 2026 press releases, says those customers can choose from more than 5,000 products and configure them online at any hour, that the company has produced printed matter for more than 40 years, and that it now has production sites in six European countries and more than 1,700 staff. German Wikipedia lists those sites as Neustadt an der Aisch, Waldbüttelbrunn, Southend-on-Sea, Aarhus in Denmark, Szczecin in Poland and Madrid.

The range runs from business cards, flyers and brochures to posters, calendars, notepads, folders and large-format work, German Wikipedia says, with promotional items and textiles added later. The English-language shop sorts these into families such as brochures, flyers and leaflets, posters, business cards and stickers, alongside trade-show displays, roll-up banners, office stationery and promotional goods; customers can upload finished print files or lay out a design in the browser. In April 2026 the company said it had added a machine and new materials for labels and stickers, cutting the production time for many such orders from seven working days to four.

German Wikipedia describes the production side in industrial terms: sheet-fed offset presses from Heidelberg’s Speedmaster series, HP Indigo digital presses, high-speed HP inkjet web presses, and finishing equipment from makers including Horizon, Polar and Durst. Orders are produced by gang-run printing, the method in which jobs from many customers share one press sheet. The German shop groups its own production pages under offset, digital, large-format digital printing and finishing.

For a design guide, Onlineprinters shows how a family print works in Franconia was recast as a pan-European web shop: the German brand diedruckerei.de gave way to a single international name in 2020, and an online magazine, which its editors say was started in 2016, publishes tutorials, typography basics and template texts for customers. Nordbayern called it one of the largest European online printers for business customers in 2016. Compare Solopress, the Essex online printer in the same group, and Flyeralarm, another German online printer in this series. For this guide we use an ink blue, a press cyan and cool greys with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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