IQ Alliance - a mini revolution!
The IQ Alliance is a “mini-revolution” in how photo gifts are marketed, sold and produced (to quote one of our customers).
The IQ Alliance is a cross-industry project of the leading photo gift manufacturers, working together with LiveLink to develop the industry. The IQ Alliance makes it simpler for retailers to increase sales whilst reducing their workload: working smarter, not harder!
The Right Partners
We've teamed up with the largest names in the photo gift industry in the UK to ensure that the photo gifts you sell in your shop are available on your kiosk. By working with The Magic Touch, Novachrome, Merlin Transfers and Xpres, we're making sure that our templates are designed to exactly match their products, making your life simpler!
Helping You Grow
We are also working with remote fulfilment partners, such as Outlab, who can help produce those photo gifts that you aren't able to make in-store. This means you can grow at your own pace, fulfilling more orders in-store when you've built up more regular custom.
Find Out More
Whether you are a photo gift supplier, a potential remote fulfilment partner or you are a customer looking to find out how you can take advantage of our 'mini-revolution', we'd love to hear from you.
What Our Customers Were Saying
Before we tell you how the solution works, here's a recap on what our customers used to tell us:
We know photo gifts give us the best margins, and we know we could sell more – but we just don't have the time to create the marketing
We need to be in control – any thing that saves us time is great, but technology is there to increase my control on how my business is grown and promoted
We need it to be dead easy for customers to visualise what they're going to get – otherwise they won't have the confidence to order 10 products in one go. Oh, and we're fed up reprinting work because of spelling mistakes in the text!
It's hard work keeping up to date with product innovation and even simple changes in source products – it makes the job more skilled and time consuming than we'd like
To really hit the sales numbers, we must get away from the situation that only a few members of skilled staff can sell photo gifts
There are other photo gifts we think our customers would buy, but we don't want to make a capital investment to produce them without an idea of the volumes we would sell. It's a chicken and egg problem!
We want a really high quality product to differentiate us from cheap imitations, and emphasise our speed and convenience”
The Solution & How it Works
We looked at all this feedback and more. We discussed it with industry leaders, analysed the product portfolio, the direction of the industry and we developed a solution: the IQ Alliance.
1. The supplier works with LiveLink to produce great templates
These templates are specifically designed for the supplier's products and take care of the really technical details: bleed, bend radius, clamp space etc. The result is an easy to use set of templates, meaning both your online and instore customers can order high quality, high margin products simply.
2. Effective marketing - tools to drive sales
The supplier works with LiveLink to create 'IQ Marketing' material such as screensavers, 'IQ Smart Stuffers', 'IQ Upsell' images and marketing posters. These are then sent to the retailer through the IQ Marketing system although it is entirely in the retailer's control what they choose to configure and use. Whatever they choose to use, however, is quickly and easily enabled.
3. Remote fulfilment - now made easier!
Because product templates are precise and easy to use, it is as easy for a remote fulfilment lab to print the gift miles away as it is to print it behind the counter. Retailers have complete choice and control - they can choose which products they produce in-house, benefiting from fast turn-round and no postage costs. Alternatively. they can out-source selected products to a remote fulfiller, saving capital cost and space, whilst retaining the option to produce them in-house at a later date, when volumes are established.