Piroto teams up with the Cobblers… if the shoe fits

Piroto teams up with the Cobblers… if the shoe fits

“We find Piroto extremely helpful, very flexible to our needs and demand from peaks of the season. They are very fast and have always found them efficient when dealing with any requests we have.”

The Customer

Our local team, Northampton Town Football Club (NTFC), known as the Cobblers, a reference to Northampton’s industrial shoe making heritage, has a chequered 120 year history. Since being rescued from the brink of administration by current chairman Kelvin Thomas though, the club has revitalised. From those dark days of 2015/6 season they have gone from strength to strength, gaining promotion to League One, hosting and giving Manchester United a tough game in the EFL Cup and sustaining their League One status for the 2017/8 season.

The Customer’s Challenge

The Cobblers have big plans for the coming years, improving the ground and the squad. Like all modern day teams they are competing for customers’ leisure spending and therefore ‘customer experience’ is important too. Every aspect of the customer journey, from ticket purchase right through to match day catering, has to be right. Good, consistent branding across all customer facing materials – including match tickets – is vitally important too; that’s where Piroto comes in.

Our Approach

Having plenty of experience in thermal tag and label printing through major clients in the food sector, one of our key aims for 2016/7 was to break into the thermal ticket market; what better way than supporting our local team! We approached Northampton Town Football Club with the view to becoming their thermal ticket partner and embarked on an exciting collaboration project to co-design the best possible match day tickets.

Working closely with NTFC ensured we understood all their needs; ultimately designing a ticket to meet requirements for security and modern barcode scanning entry systems.

What we delivered

As well as delivering great quality branded tickets that ran smoothly through the client’s thermal printer, we agreed a stock holding and delivery schedule with NTFC to ensure that they always have a supply of tickets, no matter what the circumstances, throughout the season.

Working in partnership with the client also meant that we were able to make improvements through fully understanding the printer and operational issues they faced. For example, we saw that the tickets were kept in a stack loose on top of the printer. This works very well for serving customers but every now and again, the stack would topple over, ending up in a mess on the floor! Moving the stack would have simply created another problem as this would slow down the process. Instead, we had a special ticket holder fabricated exclusively for NTFC which is held in its place, on top of the printer, with Velcro pads. The perfect solution!

The impact on the customer’s business

Both parties benefited a great deal from working in true partnership. NTFC has a co-designed and thoroughly tested ticketing system that works throughout their entire operation. Their high quality tickets show off the club’s brand really well and match their aspirations as a winning team.

The collaboration has allowed Piroto to test a number of different material and ink options which puts us in a great position to offer other ticket users an extremely reliable and great value for money product.

Leigh Mann, MD of Piroto labelling said: ‘It’s been an interesting time and great opportunity to be involved with Northampton Town Football Club and seeing, first-hand, all the improvements that are being made. We hope to play a small part in helping them achieve further success in the coming seasons, whilst we do the same with developing our ticket sales business.’

Piroto plan to continue its ticket development, networking through its partnership with Northampton Town FC and approaching other Northamptonshire based venues that use thermal ticket systems.