Introduction
At SurePlates, we’re committed to providing only the highest quality number plates to our customers. We strive for quality and precision in our business and our goal is to provide fair prices, the highest quality products, and excellent customer service to every one of our customers.
The company began with a project: to build a simple, user friendly 3D plate builder that was more accurate and easier to use than all the others on the market. Why a 3D builder? Simply because there wasn’t one. But why even bother at all? Well, after buying some plates from an online supplier myself, I was left dissatisfied with the experience. I opened the package only to see the company had gotten my registration number wrong, and the workmanship of the plates themselves was very poor. When I complained, I was ignored entirely and out of pocket.
Having had some experience in user-experience (UX) design I originally pitched the idea of a three-D plate builder to a few businesses, but received little interest. The idea was to improve user-experience and simplify the process to increase sales. They didn’t seem too bothered, and it was just something I made while working my full-time job in web development.
Months later I did market research out of interest, and it became quite obvious just how many number plates are sold online every month. Hint: it’s a lot!
Convinced I could do a better job myself, I contacted the DVLA to find out how you get started and incorporated the business soon after.
Growing the business
That was summer 2021, and I hadn’t yet given up my job. I bought some acrylic, got some adhesive rolls, and found someone to lend me time on their laser cutter so I could make 4D characters. I spent a week cutting acrylic 4D digits building up my stocks, I got the website running, uploaded my plate builder, and was ready to start.
With that, I started advertising and made my first sale on 24th July 2021 (Saturday, in case you’re wondering).
Over the next 6 months I fine tuned the plate builder taking insight from analytics data, conversion data, and real customer feedback. I simplified it further, making it more efficient to quickly and easily choose your options.
By the new year I had resigned from my job to work on the business full time. I acquired a tenancy on a premises to operate from and employed a couple of staff to help in the production process.
Quality, Accuracy, and Speed
Now that I had a full-time business with staff, it was essential that my production operatives gave as much care and attention to the orders that I did. SurePlates has meticulous quality checks in place at every stage of the production process to ensure accuracy – we don’t for example want to mis-print the registration, or print the wrong flag.
With this in mind, I set out to further refine the business by adding in some automation of various jobs. Some tasks are easy to automate. Printing, for example, is fully automated at SurePlates – there are no people standing at workstations typing out registration numbers, picking borders, or adding flags. At the click of a button, a customer’s number plates are added to the print queue for printing, their work order and shipping labels printed, and a quality check sheet is created.
Once the plates are printed and laminated, a visual inspection and proofread is performed. The plate is then trimmed and sent down the line for packaging. Another quality check is then performed by a separate operative where they check each part of your number plates: the registration, the size of each plate, the flag, the border, and a second visual inspection for bubbles and misalignment during lamination.
This automation in printing means we can fulfil orders much quicker, increasing the capacity of the business and increasing the efficiency of each operative. SurePlates now has a total capacity of several hundred orders per day.
These quality checks and automations enable us to enjoy an extremely low “failure rate” of around 1/5,000 orders (0.02%).
The Future
As a team, we are now committed to growing and expanding our business in the future. We’re investing heavily in our marketing & advertising, SEO, and brand awareness campaigns. Our ultimate goal is to provide the highest quality number plates, customer service, delivery speed, and best prices to the marketplace.
We want to imbue trust in our customers – new and old – when they shop with us. One of the ways we do this is by publicly displaying our independent reviews (both good and bad). Our TrustPilot account now has over 1,000 reviews, the vast majority of which are 5 star reviews, and we can boast a 4.9 / 5.0 star rating.
Another way we do this is by investing in good design and user-experience. Good design inspires trust because it shows the business cares about its users’ experience and improves its public persona.
SurePlates now manufactures its own materials. We make over 20,000 4D characters per month, thousands of gel characters, and have lots more printing, cutting, and laminating equipment than when I started the business in 2021.
Conclusion
SurePlates is a small but expanding business committed to quality and accuracy, customer service, and fair prices. It is our goal to become the go-to online number plate supplier, which we aim to achieve through a combination of marketing & advertising, SEO, brand awareness campaigns, combined with excellent quality products and customer service.