The fastest quote in the room wins the work.
Hear from the print leaders rebuilding their estimating around GelatoConnect Estimator - and the team behind the engine.
How printers are transforming quoting with GelatoConnect Estimator
Customer stories from leaders who are transforming estimation from a bottleneck into a growth driver.
By the numbers
Real outcomes from print shops on GelatoConnect Estimator
95%
quoting time reduction at ESP Colour, from 30 minutes to 90 seconds average
200+
estimates per day processed by ESP Colour after Estimator deployment
2x
win rate at BSG; £750K contract won by being first to respond
3-4x
quote volume increase at Inkee with no additional headcount
20 weeks
of consecutive margin growth at ESP Colour since Estimator deployment
<0.35%
error rate across all customers using AI-generated quoting
Company stories
Print shops on Estimator.
Three printers, three different starting points, the same outcome: quoting stopped being the bottleneck.
Hudson Printing
Paul Hudson
Chief Executive Officer
“It doesn’t just make our estimation team faster and more automated, it also creates a powerful new path for buyers. They can go to a printer’s website, describe what they want, and get a quote instantly. The future of print buying isn’t ahead of us, it’s already here.”
Read the full story →
ESP Colour
Simon Smogur
Chief Executive Officer
“Speed, being able to margin correctly, and our estimators being confident that it’s right first time, that’s what we’re seeing so far, and we’re on a nine-week up-streak in margin vs. last year.”
Read the full story →
Inkee
Vincenzo Cirimele
Chief Executive Officer
“We can reduce staffing by at least 50% for this activity in the back end, and increase our response rate to clients by at least 100%. It’s real-time, 24/7 estimation. We can capture much more information and more opportunities from clients, whether B2B or B2C.”
Read the full story →Paul Hudson, Hudson Printing - A hardcover quote in five minutes flat.
Print has always been too hard to buy. Paul explains how GelatoConnect Estimator turns customer language into technical specs, collapses complex jobs like hardcover books into a five-minute branded quote, and helps Hudson Printing dominate its local market.
Simon Smogur, ESP Colour - 12.5% sales growth, 19% added value, one quoting engine.
Simon walks through how ESP Colour replaced static spreadsheets and trade-print pricing with real-time, margin-controlled estimating. The result: faster responses, tighter margins, and the kind of consistency that's separating winners from the rest going into 2026.
Pradeep Sankaran, GelatoConnect - The hidden cost no PSP is talking about.
Most operators obsess over press utilisation. Pradeep makes the case that estimating - not production - is where growth quietly leaks away, and shows how automated quoting lets PSPs handle inbound surges and stop turning down high-volume tenders.
On the floor
Hear from an estimator who runs it every day.
Company-level wins are one thing. Here is what changes for the person sitting in front of the tool.
ESP Colour
Martin Lewis
Senior Estimator
30+ min → 1.7 min
per quote, for the first 1,000 estimates Martin sent through GelatoConnect Estimator
“Going from 30+ minutes to 1.7 minutes per quote means I spend my time on customers, not arithmetic. AI handles 90% of the routine, I focus on the relationships that win the deal.”
Read the full story →What changes
Where the leverage shows up.
Customers describe three places they feel the change, usually within the first two months of going live.
Quality you keep
98% on-time delivery and error rates under 0.35%, against 1.5% for shops still quoting manually. ESP Colour books a customer-ready quote in under 5 minutes from RFQ to send.
Margin you grow
A 3-7 percentage-point lift in operating margin once accurate pricing and faster turnaround start compounding. ESP Colour is on a 20-week consecutive margin growth streak since deployment.
Capacity you unlock
BSG won a £750K contract by being first to respond after going live in 30 days. Inkee triples quote volume without hiring. Hudson Printing turns its own website into a 24/7 quoting front door.
Hear directly from the leaders using Estimator
Watch Paul Hudson in conversation with Pradeep on how faster quoting is reshaping print buying.
Frequently asked questions
Print estimating software customer stories, answered
What kinds of print shops are using GelatoConnect Estimator?+
Commercial print shops with €300K-€5M revenue, packaging printers, apparel decorators, and wide-format printers. The common thread is that quoting was a bottleneck — too slow, too inconsistent, too dependent on a small group of senior estimators. Notable customers include ESP Colour, BSG, Inkee, Hudson Printing, and Ink n'Art.
How long does it take to see results?+
ESP Colour saw 95% quoting time reduction in week one. BSG won a £750K contract by being first to respond within 30 days of going live. Most customers report material outcomes inside the first two months. Full ROI typically lands inside three months.
What outcomes do customers most commonly report?+
Faster response (15 seconds vs 30+ minutes manual), higher win rates (BSG doubled theirs), higher quote volume (Inkee tripled), and consistent pricing across the team (no more 'every estimator quotes differently'). Several also report margin uplift because the engine flags margin anomalies before quotes go out.
Are there customers in packaging?+
Yes. Ink n'Art moved from 20-minute manual packaging quotes to 20-second AI-generated ones. The packaging pricing model handles folding cartons, corrugated, labels, and rigid boxes with the same accuracy as commercial print.
What sets the most successful customers apart?+
Two things: they ran the calibration step seriously (loading their actual cost structure into the engine, not industry defaults), and they retrained their senior estimators on margin and exception handling rather than arithmetic. The customers who get the most leverage treat the Estimator as a force multiplier, not a replacement.
How is success measured?+
Quoting time per job, quote volume per week, win rate, average response time to RFQ, error rate on issued quotes, and customer-side metrics like deal velocity. GelatoConnect Estimator dashboards track all of these in real time. Most customers also surface them in their own BI tooling via the API.
How do I become a customer story?+
Customers who hit notable outcomes inside their first 90 days are typically invited to participate in a webinar or written case study. The marketing team will reach out — there's no application process. Recent additions include ESP Colour, BSG, Inkee, and Ink n'Art.