GelatoConnect and the customer-led future of print

For Henrik Müller-Hansen, the future of printing starts with a deceptively simple question: Who is the business built around, the machine or the customer?

In an interview with The Dead Pixels Society, the GelatoConnect founder and CEO described a market moving away from production organized around specific equipment and toward a software-driven model of production on demand.

“I think that the industry consists of two sides in a marketplace,” Müller-Hansen said. “You have the creators and the consumers, and you have the producers.” GelatoConnect, he said, aims to be the “glue” connecting creators and makers, reducing friction through software.

That becomes more important as production floors grow complicated. A facility once identified with one press maker may now run equipment from five to 10 vendors, each with its own software. Customers, meanwhile, rarely care which machine produced their order. They remember whether it arrived on time and whether a damaged product was refunded.

Müller-Hansen argues that software independent of a particular machine can help businesses use existing capacity more effectively. Gelato owns no production equipment, a distinction that shapes its approach to connecting orders with producers.

From printing to production on demand

“For me, when you say printing, we’ve narrowed down what this industry is capable of doing quite significantly,” he said. “For me, it’s production on demand.”

That category includes conventional printed pieces alongside phone cases, clothing, drinkware and wall décor. Müller-Hansen sees younger buyers expecting personalization and questioning why products must travel long distances from a factory to a customer. Established businesses, he suggested, need to understand those expectations rather than defend familiar production methods.

“There are many owners in this industry of print facilities that are spending far too much time defending their memory, instead of seeking to understand the new generation,” he said.

Print still has a place with those buyers. “I think that print absolutely plays a role for the next generation,” Müller-Hansen said. “But I think that it is much more a personalized expression than a standardized mass-market communication.” He sees that expression in products ranging from brochures to T-shirts and wall art.

Print service providers also need a clearer view of their operations. Multiple equipment platforms, product categories and software systems can obscure what happens between receiving an order and shipping it.

“When you have no visibility, you can’t make decisions,” Müller-Hansen said. “You can’t take investments, and you can’t support your customers.”

Creators selling internationally face their own complexities: manufacturing, shipping, taxes, transactions, data storage, refunds and reprints. Müller-Hansen sees a global production network connected by software as one way to manage that work while moving production closer to customers.

Ultimately, he returns to the choice between following customer demand and following the installed equipment base. “If you’re customer-led, you’re going to have a lot of painful discussions,” he said. “You’re going to have a lot of painful decisions, but you’re going to at least take the right painful discussions and decisions.”

Speed over perfection

His other priority is speed. “We have always said that speed is always winning over perfection,” said Müller-Hansen. “We believe that it will eventually be the fast that wins over the slow, and not the big that wins over the small.”

That view influences hiring. Gelato recruits software talent from companies such as Amazon, Google and Palantir, while relying on print service provider partners for production expertise. Müller-Hansen sees the ability to respond quickly to changing customers and products as essential to the industry’s future.