A hundred stores. Dozens of SKUs. Price labels, window graphics, uniforms, POS displays and a marketing team that was supposed to be doing something else entirely. That was Hotel Chocolat’s print reality before we got involved. What followed is a useful illustration of what retail print management can look like when it’s done properly.
We’ve been managing print for multi-site retailers for over 30 years. From procurement and production through to distribution and stock management. The challenge, almost without exception, is the same: how do you keep costs down, brand consistency up, and central teams out of the weeds?
The Real Cost of Getting Print Wrong
As retail brands expand, print complexity compounds quickly. Each new store means more materials to manage, more requests to field, more opportunities for brand inconsistency — and more time lost by marketing teams who should be focused on campaigns, not chasing print orders. For Hotel Chocolat, a brand growing rapidly across multiple locations, this tension was becoming harder to absorb.
Enter Sprint: Putting Stores in Control
We built Sprint. A branded, centralised online ordering platform, specifically around Hotel Chocolat’s retail structure. Every store manager gained direct access to approved print and POS materials: price labels, window graphics, uniforms and more. No head office bottleneck. No back-and-forth. Just the right materials, available on demand.
Because every item on the platform had already been approved centrally, brand consistency was built in, not bolted on. Stores ordered quickly and independently; the marketing team stopped fielding requests they should never have been fielding in the first place.
Bulk Economics, On-Demand Flexibility — Not a Trade-Off
Most brands think they have to choose between low unit costs and ordering flexibility. We’d argue they don’t. We manufacture at volume to drive costs down, then make those items available for stores to call off as needed. Hotel Chocolat got bulk pricing without bulk ordering. Stores got what they needed, when they needed it, without tying up budget in stock that sits in a back office.
This is central to how we approach procurement. Using 30 years of supply chain relationships and volume expertise to deliver consistent quality at rates that genuinely move the needle for multi-site businesses.
Giving Marketing Teams Their Time Back
We moved print decisions to the people closest to each store and in doing so, took a significant administrative load off the central marketing team. Instead of fielding daily requests for price labels and window graphics, they could focus on campaign planning, product launches and the work that actually drives the brand forward. Brand consistency didn’t suffer. It improved.
As new locations opened, we onboarded them to Sprint quickly, so print management scaled with the business, not against it. Every new store hit the ground running from day one.
Print Is an Operational Edge. Most Brands Aren’t Using It.
Retail print is chronically underinvested in. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because nobody has made it easy enough to get right. The brands that do get it right gain a quiet operational edge: stores that run smoothly, marketing teams that focus on marketing, and a brand that looks consistent whether you’re walking into a flagship or a concession.
For Hotel Chocolat, Sprint turned print from a drain on central resource into something that simply works. That’s what good print management should always look like.
Sound Familiar? Let’s Talk.
If your stores are spending too much time chasing print or your marketing team is spending too much time managing it, we’d love to show you what Sprint can do.
Start with a print audit, it costs nothing and usually reveals quite a lot. Get in touch and we’ll take it from there.
