Solopress Brand Guidelines: A 1999 Southend Online Printer Inside the Onlineprinters Group

An online printer from the Essex coast.

Solopress is an online printer based in Southend-on-Sea, in Essex. Print Monthly reported in January 2025 that the business was established in 1999 by three former school friends, Greg Ralph, Andy Smith and Aron Priest, and that Ralph played a key role in its early growth before stepping away in 2012 to work in e-commerce, consultancy and property. He returned in January 2025 as sales and customer success director, the magazine said, more than a decade after he had left.

From the start the company sold print through a website rather than a shop counter. In a company profile published in January 2023, Print Monthly described Solopress as a business that had “cut its teeth” as an online e-commerce company and had since grown into a job aggregator covering litho printing, digital printing, high-speed inkjet, wide-format work and a range of merchandise. Its early customers were mostly small businesses and private buyers; the same profile quotes the company saying that a person ordering party invitations and a marketing manager ordering brochures once received much the same service.

In 2017 Solopress was bought by the Onlineprinters Group, the German online printer, which, Print Monthly reported in January 2025, acquired it to establish manufacturing in the United Kingdom. Simon Cooper became managing director of Solopress in 2019. In August 2024 the group named him managing director of the online business of both the Onlineprinters and Solopress brands, and by January 2025 he was chief executive of Solopress in the UK and of Onlineprinters in Germany, according to Print Monthly.

Presses, sites and sub-brands.

Solopress presents itself as a manufacturer as much as a website. The January 2023 profile in Print Monthly describes a multi-site business running around the clock six days a week, with a peak season from September to the end of the year. When Cooper joined in 2019, he told the magazine, the plant ran B2 litho presses and iGen digital presses; since then the company has added high-speed inkjet and replaced much of the older litho. In 2022 it opened a new building it calls Site 4 and installed a ten-colour B1 Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 106 with a coater there, a pre-owned press sourced through Excel Printing Machinery. In August 2024 Print Monthly reported a second B1 Speedmaster, an HP Indigo 120K digital press and a Konica Minolta foiling unit; in March 2026 the magazine reported that Solopress was the first UK company to install a Ricoh Pro VC80000 high-speed inkjet press, with its operations director citing steady growth in brochure printing.

The product range has widened in the same years. In March 2023, on World Book Day, Solopress launched a range of paperback books as its route into publishing, and it joined the Independent Print Industries Association and, as an accredited member, the British Promotional Merchandise Association, Print Monthly reported, noting existing ties with the BPIF and Two Sides. Cooper told the magazine that branded pens, bags and gifts now sit beside printed handouts and signage, so that a business heading to a trade event can order all of it in one place.

Around the main website the company has built a set of named sub-brands. Solopro gives resellers and trade customers a dedicated account manager; Soloflo is its print API; and Brand Central is a microsite option that gives a business with many branches or franchises its own print ordering portal, Print Monthly reported in January 2025. In March 2024 it relaunched its in-house artwork service as Solopress Design, with five tiers running from small amendments to a “Design Plus” option, the week after it won Company of the Year at the Printweek Awards, the magazine said.

How online printers present themselves.

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.

From a website to a print engine for others.

Inside the Onlineprinters Group, Solopress has become the brand for the British market. In January 2025 Print Monthly reported that the customers of the group’s UK website, onlineprinters.co.uk, were being moved to Solopress, a process that had begun in November 2024, as part of a plan to streamline the group’s operations. By November 2026 the onlineprinters.co.uk address led straight to a page on Solopress’s own site. The group has said it will keep producing locally in Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain.

The newest step turns the Southend plant into a back office for other sellers. At The Print Show in 2026 Solopress introduced Forge, a closed platform for verified printers, resellers, brokers and print managers, who see trade pricing that is not shown publicly, add their own margin, build branded quotes and order through Solopress production with white-label delivery, Print Monthly reported in October 2026. Alongside it came Dock, which connects online shops such as Shopify stores to the company’s production: buyers choose options, upload artwork and pass a built-in artwork check, and Solopress prints, packs and dispatches the order in unbranded packaging, the magazine reported in November 2026.

Locally the name is visible beyond print. In September 2021 the Southend Echo reported that Solopress would sponsor the North Bank stand at Southend United’s Roots Hall ground and become the club’s official print partner, with boards above the stand and around the players’ tunnel.

For a design guide, Solopress shows how an online printer’s brand can widen from a consumer website into named services for designers, resellers and shop owners, each with its own label. Compare Onlineprinters, its German parent brand, and Mixam, another British printer that moved its orders online. For this guide we use an estuary teal, a dark ink, an uncoated cream and an orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Solopress’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.