Quark unveils free online tool for small-biz

Quark Inc. is moving into the business of producing small companies’ marketing materials and print-job ordering with a free online product it unveiled Thursday.

The Denver-based publishing software maker’s Quark Promote product aims to tap a lucrative new market. If successful, the company projects Quark Promote will generate as many as 500 new jobs at its headquarters.

“In these crazy times, it’s great to be able to put out good news like that,” said CEO Ray Schiavone.

First, Quark Promote will have to attract the customers and generate a revenue. Schiavone likes Quark’s chances.

“If we’re even marginally successful with this, it will drive a lot of new jobs,” he said.

Quark launched the effort with a gathering Thursday on the steps of its downtown headquarters. The event featured comments praising Quark’s commitment to grow in Denver from Colorado Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien, Secretary of State Bernie Buescher and Kelly Brough, president of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.

Quark Promote is a free tool for small and medium-sized business owners unfamiliar with publication design.

An entrepreneur looking to create marketing material for a dental practice, spa, consulting firm or any other business would go online to www.quarkpromote.com. There, they’d find templates of promotional publications — business cards, post card-sized mailers, glossy tri-fold brochures and more — already designed and ready for the printer once the user adds a business name, address and other details.

The Quark Promote templates include stock photos and marketing copy specific to 17 different industries. Quark Promote allows users to change color schemes, swap in their own photos or words and, with a couple of mouse clicks, find a nearby printer set up to handle the job.

Quark aims to offer a higher design quality than its competitors.

Professional ad designers working for Quark designed the templates. The resulting material is meant to give an entrepreneur professional-grade marketing collateral without having to hire an outside design agency and then separately wrangle with a printer.

Quark makes money on the service by getting a cut of the printing revenue back from the printers.

Local printing franchise owners from Alpha Graphics, Pip Printing and Marketing Services and Sir Speedy attended Quark Promote’s launch event. They are among small-printing franchises that have signed up to offer the Quark Promote service.

They praised the potential of Quark’s product to combat the growing dominance of centralized, low-cost printers, such as VistaPrint, in the small-business printing niche. Driving customers to local print shops should help Quark beat the VistaPrint model with improved customer service, they said.

Quark Promote should also drives customers to their stores, where they’re likely to spend money on things like sign printing or other services not found in Quark’s new product, said Mike Booth, franchise owner for the Sir Speedy location in Centennial.

Sharing revenue on Quark Promote jobs means smaller-than-usual margins, but they expect the arrangement will increase work from small businesses overall.

“Considering the amount of work we do for these jobs on the front-end — which is nothing — it’s worth it” said Steve Collins, president and general manager of the Pip Printing in Englewood. “I’ll take those margins all day long.”

Quark Promote is the latest new wrinkle for a company that helped revolutionize desktop publishing and became the dominant tool for graphic designers before competition from Adobe relegated Quark to second place in market share over the past decade.

The shrinkage of magazine and newspaper industries — which has led to many shuttered publications over the past two years — has battered design software makers and forced them to look at new uses for their tools.

After Schiavone became CEO in late 2006, Quark looked to make its software integral to automated, industrial-scale print and web publishing for very large corporations.

Now it’s looking to the other end of the spectrum: truly small businesses.

VistaPrint does more than $500 million in annual sales from its online, small business printing service, Schiavone said, and yet the market for such work has barely been tapped.

Quark is readying to launch Quark Promote in Australia and Great Britain. It hopes to start launching in non-English-speaking nations, and offering marketing material in other languages domestically, in a year.

Quark foresees eventually extending to small businesses the expertise beyond print that it sells to large industries. Schiavone said he envisions Quark Promote one day offering small businesses automated publishing across a variety of electronic platforms, from email and mobile phones to personal URLs.

“Whether we do it or not, it doesn’t matter — this is the wave,” he said. “If we don’t do it, someone else will.”

gavery@bizjournals.com | 303-803-9222

Denver Business Journal