Work · 2026
Inkmark
Replaced a mockup-by-email approval loop with a design studio customers use themselves.
- Sector
- Printing, embroidery and engraving
- Where
- Nairobi, Kenya
- Built with
- TypeScript, Cloudflare Workers, Canvas
Every order began the same way. A customer sent a logo by email or WhatsApp and described where they wanted it — "centred on the chest, about the size of a fist". Someone at Inkmark interpreted that, produced a mockup, and sent it back.
Then it came back again. Bigger. Lower. A different colour thread. Each round was a person stopping other work to reposition artwork and re-export an image, and none of it was billable.
The expensive failures happened after approval, not before. A customer signs off on a flat picture of a logo, the job goes to print or to the embroidery machine, and what arrives is not what they pictured. That is a reprint, absorbed by Inkmark.
A design studio the customer opens in their browser. They upload their artwork, place it on the actual product, scale and position it, and see the result on the item itself rather than as a flat image.
What they approve is what goes to production — the same placement data, passed straight through instead of being re-interpreted by hand.
Orders arrive already specified, so a quote does not have to wait on a round of mockups first.
- The mockup round trip is gone from the process. Customers position and scale their own artwork instead of describing it and waiting on someone to interpret it.
- What the customer approves is the placement that goes to production — the same data passed through, not a person re-reading a picture.
- Approval happens on a render of the actual item rather than a flat image, which is where the costly mismatches came from.
- An order arrives already specified, so quoting no longer waits on a round of artwork first.
Before this, every job started with someone describing where they wanted their logo and us guessing what they meant. We would send a mockup, they would ask for it bigger, we would send another. Two or three rounds before we could even quote the job. Now the customer places it themselves and approves the thing they are actually going to receive. The arguments about size and position have stopped, and so have the reprints we used to absorb.
Something in your business runs like this?
Six questions about the problem, in plain language. Fixed scope, fixed price, and it goes straight to us.