Home Articles News About Contact
About

More than ten years of the same print errors. I'm building the check that catches them.

Printulse checks print files for errors that later cost money and reputation.

Printulse is being developed for designers, prepress specialists, and account managers working with labels, flexo, and packaging. It will check color, dates, barcodes and text.

Elena Tkachova, founder of Printulse
Elena Tkachova, founderArdennes, France
10+
years in B2B print and packaging
10–35
orders in work at the same time
1K–3M
units in a single print run
Story

Where this comes from

I work in B2B printing and packaging. Over the years I've been on the shop floor, in prepress, in admin and in management, so I've followed the work all the way and seen many different situations, from the moment a file arrives to the moment the customer receives the finished product.

In print, an error rarely looks like an error. Here are three cases from my work:

  • A designer who didn't know print requirements once handed us a series of boxes with the same barcode artwork, where only the digits underneath had been corrected. The bars stayed the same. Later the pharmacies sent the product back: it didn't scan correctly at the checkout.
  • The instructions said 30 °C, the degree sign turned into a zero, and nobody noticed. The storage conditions ended up reading 300C.
  • For a whole year we regularly printed a dog shampoo label with the letter “p” missing from the word “Shampoo”, right in the center. Nobody noticed. The customer had sent that file himself, everyone saw it, and it was proofread for errors and typos. Only after a year of regular repeats did the customer send the next order for that item and ask us to add the letter.

Some errors are visible at once, others we miss because of the human factor. Every missed error costs money and reputation. Reputation is easy to lose: the drop is remembered at once and for a long time, and winning it back completely is almost impossible.

Printulse helps cut the time it takes to process a file and catch what a person sometimes misses while doing it.

I'm building it on real layouts, in cooperation with a working manufacturer of flexo and offset packaging.

I'm not showing the product yet. For now I share what's useful: articles on print, design and file preparation, and build notes on LinkedIn and X.

Seen something like this?

Tell me which errors you meet most often in files. The answer is anonymous and takes a minute.

Share your experience

Be among the first to get early access to the product

First you get a confirmation that you're on the list. Then a message when the demo opens, and another when new versions are connected. Only real news, no advertising.

Not ready to sign up?
Write to me Follow on LinkedIn X