Underground Printing enhances the customer experience with Jotform

Underground Printing is a national custom and digital printed apparel provider that offers screen printing and embroidery services to organizations of all sizes. Through the years, the company has maintained a focus on providing the best community and customer experience, in part, by having an unparalleled custom printing process.

When Underground Printing looked to supplement its printing workflow with a best-in-class data-collection solution for orders, Jotform was there.

In this customer spotlight, we’ll explore how Underground Printing used Jotform to ensure a smooth ordering experience and data flow with its backend systems.

Scalable, turnkey data solutions for clients

When you have as many clients as Underground Printing does — some of which are Fortune 500 companies — you need fast and reliable workflows for producing custom printed apparel and promotional products.

Like many companies, Underground Printing’s team uses Google Workspace for team organization. And while Google Workspace comes with its own practical form solution, the team at Underground Printing found Google was missing the form versatility and connectivity necessary to design the specialized ordering systems their in-house development team needed for larger clients.

Underground Printing’s cofounder, Rishi Narayan, knew they needed a more efficient tool.

“Part of what makes us unique is our ability to create workflows suited to our clients’ unique use cases…. We needed a form solution that had certain throughputs and robustness, such as the ability to integrate tools like Zapier and/or APIs into our own backend systems.”

Underground Printing has been on a growth trajectory for years, and with a handful of important clients submitting a lot of responses in a short amount of time, the business couldn’t afford to have information bottleneck and limit its ability to handle a large volume of orders.

A front-end solution that unlocks new workflow potential

Narayan’s team came upon Jotform in the course of searching for solutions to replace Google Forms. They discovered that capabilities like if-then logic and hidden fields satisfied the versatility side, while the number of integration partners and platform uptime for Jotform checked the other boxes they had to have.

By using Jotform to pull order data into Underground Printing’s systems, the team was able to bridge other aspects of their workflow they couldn’t previously (data piping for instance).

The new platform also allowed them to embed their forms on their website: a big benefit for ease of use and efficiency, especially when those specialized ordering systems need to handle nuances such as bulk printing, individual kitting, and shipment of orders.

The conditional logic features act like a quality control up front, helping to ensure orders are accurate and precise, which is imperative for the number of orders that need to be fulfilled as the company continues to grow.

“Jotform allowed us the freedom and the confidence to go after very niche programs, customers that require data and workflow customization, and not have to feel like we’re on the hook for building everything ourselves,” said Narayan.

Now that the team has had a chance to see what the platform can do, Underground Printing is introducing Jotform in the onboarding and setup phases of the sales cycle as part of the marketing mix. They’re thinking about implementing Jotform in a completely different way than anticipated when they first signed up.

A better experience through form versatility and software connectivity

A simple effort to find a lead and order collection tool led Underground Printing to Jotform, which not only covers those capabilities but also provides a larger workflow solution that offers the potential for much more.

One of the biggest benefits for Underground Printing was the amount of time and work the organization’s development team saved. Instead of spending countless hours building a front-end lead capture system, the team used Jotform’s sophisticated plug-and-play solution, which freed them up to build other in-demand systems, such as tailoring services to some of the clients referenced earlier.

Another benefit for Narayan’s team is the ability to use Jotform in conjunction with proprietary systems that are unique to their industry and the type of services they provide.

Plugging Jotform into their marketing software stack gave them the ability to integrate all of their software, which is very important considering the kind of data being collected and how it needs to be used in subsequent workflows like fulfillment and customer service. 

We’re in the world of providing an amazing customer experience for custom T-shirts. So Jotform is great in saving our own development time from figuring out how to provide the information collection technology. It’s definitely a part of helping us scale the business.

Rishi Narayan, Cofounder of Underground Printing

Finally, Narayan’s marketing, sales, and development teams lean on custom form elements that validate product and customer data more effectively. The platform’s versatility in designing workflows has saved his team valuable time on the back end and made portability of data into the organization’s systems more efficient.

For a custom printed apparel supplier with a national scope, including physical retail locations throughout the country, the challenge is to maintain a strong sense of local community while offering the ease of use (and scalability) of a dynamic online ordering system.

So whether it’s a college kid coming in to place an order for her sorority and chat in person, or an enterprise company ordering business swag online, Underground Printing will offer the same high-level customer experience that creates long lasting relationships…and Jotform will help.