Catapult Print maximizes profitability with Nilpeter

Six years since its founding, Catapult Print has seen explosive growth and is on track to hit 60 million USD this summer. 

True to its name, the custom label printer catapulted onto the scene in April 2018, when founder and chairman Mark Cook launched his dream from the ground up in Orlando, Florida. 

A soccer injury took Mark Cook out of the sports world, landing him in the printing world after asking his brother Ash Cook for a job at the print company he was working at. 

So, Mark Cook started out packing boxes. However, he quickly rose through the ranks from finishing to press operator to sales, becoming a shareholder in eight years. 

In 2013, he joined Equator Design, a global packaging design agency, and after its sale to SGK in 2017, branched out on his own to address the quality and service issues in the US print industry. 

Many printers are still doing the same thing they’ve been doing for 30 years, and Catapult is challenging the status quo

Labeled a startup then without a single customer, Catapult Print has become one of the industry leaders in just six years, achieving a record number of sales in the Q1 2024. 

Since January, the converter has sold over 513 million labels, up 45.8 percent from the same period last year. That’s 52 million feet of labels in the first four months of the year, also up 16.6 percent from Q1 2023. 

The company started with the mentality, ‘If we build it, they will come,’ according to co-founder and CEO Lewis Cook.  

Shaking up a ‘stale’ industry 

‘The market is very stale and needs disrupting,’ Lewis Cook says. ‘Many printers are still doing the same thing they’ve been doing for 30 years, and Catapult is challenging the status quo.’ 

From the beginning, Catapult sought to be different. With a bold emphasis on four principles – quality, price, service and lead times – it achieved a record sales increase of 32.4 percent with a total of 8,300 SKUs dispatched this past quarter. In Q1 2024, Catapult fulfilled 99 percent of orders on time with an average lead time of 5.3 days and 21 percent of orders within just two days. 

In particular, the Cooks call out ‘old technology, manual processes and a lack of transparency’ industry-wide that impedes its outlook. It’s time, they urge, for the industry as a whole to reflect the modern day of transparent data and instant access. 

Boasting organic growth, Catapult has onboarded 55 new customers in 2023 alone. ‘[This] shows we are doing something right,’ Mark Cook says. ‘Our passion to create a customer-focused business that is truly changing and disrupting the industry is key to our success.’ 

Understanding the audience 

Clearly, the Cooks understand their audience, their needs and their wants, and make sure to deliver. 

‘Every new customer I speak to has two priorities: lead time and price,’ Mark Cook says. ‘That’s why we built the business, to offer something unique and different. I’m blown away every day at what we’ve created with technology, automation, systems and data that give customers everything: better costs, better quality, better lead times and better service. You truly have to see it to believe it.’ 

Catapult’s formula for success seems simple enough but impossible to do: giving customers what they want – higher quality, lower prices, better service and shorter lead times. 

‘We have created a unique model that enables us to offer customers significantly shorter lead times and lower prices by digitalizing the flexo process,’ Lewis Cook says. 

Catapult is leveraging the latest technology, automating manual, time-consuming tasks, and developing bespoke systems to manage workflow and create an agile production environment. Using live data also allows the converter to continuously improve. 

Crystal, Catapult’s purpose-built platform, serves as an in-house system and is utilized internally and externally. The client portal provides real-time data on all aspects of its projects, artworks, orders and inventory, providing full visibility of each job. 

‘We’ve lean engineered the entire process, from order to dispatch, to help us become quicker and slicker than any of our competitors, which means we are more responsive and more cost-effective than any other flexo supplier,’ Lewis Cook says. In numbers, that means 30 different jobs in a 12-hour period on one press. ‘If you think conventional, that would be impossible in any normal business.’ 

Now the USD 55M business with over 100 employees worldwide is on track to hit USD 60M in July. Catapult’s best quarter yet is the fruition of its service-driven, lean production model as it gains traction across the pressure-sensitive and linerless label sectors. 

To spur that momentum at the start of the year, Catapult installed the first Nilpeter FA-26 press in the US, its eighth FA-line press but the first in 26-inch web width that will take production wider and faster. ‘This is the most automated flexo on the market,’ Lewis Cook says. ‘We believe in these presses.’ 

And they’re not afraid to share their secret sauce for success because Catapult is already eyeing another 26in press for its next phase of growth.