Gelato: Sustainable production on demand: Facilitating global trade through local production

Gelato was launched in 2012, and it has since created the world's largest network for local production and distribution of customized products. Through Gelato's marketplace platform, e-commerce sellers and creators can drive print-on-demand business models by working with printing suppliers to customize products with their own designs to sell them on a per-order basis under their own brand. With the latest funding round of $240 million in August 2021, Gelato is driven to grow as a platform for the creator economy, self-signups, and application programming interfaces (APIs). Investors want to focus on the platform, the geographical expansion, and new products. Gelato has kept adding more products to its portfolio: T-shirts, hoodies, sportswear, baby clothing, phone cases, posters, canvas, wallpaper, mugs, calendars, and cards, among others. Through its network of 130 production partners in 32 countries, Gelato offers creators and e-commerce sellers a reach of 5 billion consumers worldwide within 72 hours. One of the secrets to its success is remaining extremely light on fixed assets since Gelato owns no printers or production sites. However, technology evolves fast, and print speed and quality improve in the print industry every year. Thus, by not owning assets, Gelato must partner with the most effective production technologies. For that, Gelato needs to keep developing innovative software to interact with the different equipment and provide the optimal inputs for production. Another key part of Gelato?s API is its routing algorithm, which allocates production to the different production partners. Gelato facilitates global trade through local production by helping the world move from centralized mass production to local on-demand production. Therefore, producing locally and on demand reduces transportation distances and waste from overproduction, which, in turn, lowers carbon emissions. With such a value proposition, Gelato can drive sustainability and guarantee a better experience and delivery promise for the end customer. Furthermore, Gelato strives to foster a global collaborative community of creators for the growing creator economy. Many small (and some bigger) e-commerce businesses, referred to as ?self-signups,? represent significant business scalability for Gelato, which offers them free sign-ups, a broad range of integrations with different applications, access to thousands of products assorted through 100+ production centers around the globe, and many other services for order management, payment, and billing (dashboards, tracking, pre-paid wallets, local currencies, taxes, and VAT handling). Gelato faces different opportunities to scale the business with new products (branded packaging, home decoration, jewelry), new technologies (3D printing), new geographies, and new services.