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Omni Prepaid Group LLC, the parent of GiftCards.com LLC, has received Visa certification and began printing its own gift cards Sept. 5.
The company has set up a printing plant at its headquarters in Pittsburgh, it says.
GiftCards.com sells gift cards to consumers and to more than 5,000 corporate clients, the company says.
By doing its own printing, Omni can create custom cards for customers and produce the cards within a day, Jason Wolfe, Omni CEO, tells Prepaid Trends.
"Our niche is mostly the smaller runs that are more customized than the 100,000 card orders," Wolfe says. "We can do one [card] or 100 or 1,000."
The company plans to build new business lines around its printing plant, including OmniBuild, an online application that will enable customers to create custom cards through an Internet site, Wolfe says. Omni launched that in the middle of September.
"The evolution of what we're trying to accomplish in the prepaid space calls for us to have more involvement with the product that we ship off," Wolfe says.
In October, Omni plans to offer a service that will enable retailers to have closed-loop gift cards printed and sold on the Omni Web site, Wolfe says.
Vance L. Hodnett, vice president of research for financial institutions with Pelorus Group Inc., a consulting firm based in Raritan, N. J., says that a company that makes its own cards could have an advantage over competitors. It potentially could produce cards more cheaply, have more control over the final product and control the time it takes to bring cards to market.
Timing can become a big advantage with gift cards, especially if a company wants to offer gift cards that carry themes, Hodnett says. "If some hot movie came out and you wanted to have a themed gift card [related to the film}...that is where speed would be good," he says.
Fast orders and custom cards will serve as Omni's selling points, Wolfe says. For instance, Omni could make an incentive card with an employee's photo on it for a company that wants to recognize someone for a job well done, he says.
By having its own printing plant, Omni eliminates the need to ship out the card order and wait for it to come back before it could supply the card to a company, Wolfe says. "You're talking about cutting down from weeks to a day," he says of the time to fill an order.
The costs for cards printed on demand will be higher than preprinted cards, but customers will be willing to pay the premium for the benefits, Wolfe says.
"We're focusing our efforts more on vale than on volume," he says.
The company currently loads about $70 million a year onto cards and Wolfe expects that to go up with the addition of the new printing plant. First Gulf Bank, which is based in Pensacola, Fla., issues the company's prepaid Visa cards.
