Back in 2006 we launched one of the world’s very first online Photobook brands.  We birthed albumworks.com.au, grew fast and soon began working with some of Australia’s pre-eminent retailers in providing their complete white labelled and branded photo product offer.

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To keep up with our rapid growth, we needed to build an incredibly flexible manufacturing automation platform. It had to handle a massive number of unique orders, each tailored to a specific customer's needs - different sizes, papers, laminates, cover options, accessories, embossing, and more whilst being routed through different press-finishing workflow all while meeting different service levels and quality standards with different shipping options.

Sounds complicated – and it is.  To do that at scale with cost insight requires something pretty special.  So we built a platform for ourselves that we called Zen, for the manufacturing calmness that it brought.  Functionally it was unique, the business benefits profound.

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It was always on our radar to commercialise the platform and that plan was finally hatched in 2019 when we rebuilt the platform on a completely new stack, end to end controlled by Pictureworks and scalable to enterprise volumes.  

We rebranded the platform ZenSmart and took the platform out to the global market.

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We now service some of the world’s largest and most innovative digital image manufacturing companies with a team located across the globe to provide 24 hour delivery and support whilst continuing to provide a beautiful photo product service with albumworks.com.au.