Fun Cases has invested £120,000 in two state-of-the-art automatic UV printers. The machines run twenty-four hours a day with no operator standing over them, cutting manual labour, lifting print quality, and collapsing the order-to-print pipeline to under three minutes.
Each printer holds 1,400 blank phone cases at a time. Once loaded, the machine handles everything autonomously. It picks the next case, positions it, prints, and ejects, with no operator intervention during the print itself.
The Webgro bridge
Hardware alone is not the story. The result depends on orders flowing into the machine without delay. Webgro, our in-house agency, built a custom API bridge between Shopify and the printers. A customer order placed on funcases.com now triggers a print job within three minutes.
No queue management, no manual exporting of orders, no print-shop spreadsheet. The bridge handles the entire handoff, including SKU resolution, image asset selection, and print-bed positioning.
What happens after the print
Printed cases drop from the machines into outbound bins, where the Fun Cases packing team matches each case to its order, packages it, and ships it. The human element of the operation now sits firmly on the customer-experience side, not the production side.
There's genuine excitement around these state-of-the-art machines. A worthy investment that should see ROI within six months.
Michael Broadbridge, Co-founder
Why this matters
The numbers shift in three places. Manual labour hours fall, because the machines run twenty-four hours a day without an operator standing over them. Print quality lifts, because machine-controlled UV deposition is more consistent than hand-operated production. And throughput climbs, because the printers don't take breaks, get tired, or slow down at four in the afternoon.
What's next
Throughput modelling suggests capacity for three to four times the current Fun Cases order volume on the existing two machines. As volume grows, additional units can be added to the same Webgro bridge with no architectural change.
