Belmark Replaced FTP Sprawl With a Branded Files.com Front Door Around Esko Prepress

Belmark makes the packaging that consumer-goods brands put on shelves: pressure-sensitive labels, flexible packaging, and folding cartons. Headquartered in De Pere, Wisconsin, the company employs roughly 1,100 people across plants in Wisconsin and Arizona.

Every job starts the same way. A brand hands Belmark an artwork file. The graphics operation turns that file into something a press can print, and a proof goes back to the customer for approval. Files cross the company line at the start of every order and again before every run. That exchange is the front door of production.

An Exchange Spread Across All Sorts of FTP Sites

For years, the front door was not one door. Customer artwork arrived through an assortment of separate FTP sites, accumulated one arrangement at a time as customers came on. Belmark's customer service team, the people who deal with the brands directly, absorbed the sprawl: retrieving a customer's files meant knowing which site that customer used and going there to get them. A newly onboarded brand had no single address to send art to, there was no consistent way for the production side to learn that new art was waiting, and nothing about the experience carried Belmark's name. The least consistent step in the whole workflow sat at its very start.

The sprawl persisted because no single piece of it was broken. Each FTP site did its one job for the customer it served, and replacing the whole arrangement was hard at both ends. The senders were people Belmark did not control: designers and brand contacts at customer companies, many of whom would never hold an account on any system Belmark ran. The receivers were a live prepress operation, built around Esko's automation and proofing platform, that needed to start on artwork the moment it landed.

What Belmark needed was one exchange under its own name: intake any customer contact could use with no account and nothing to install, notifications that routed each arrival to the right internal team, an outbound path for finished proofs, and no disturbance to the prepress systems behind it. Belmark consolidated the exchange onto Files.com, with the color team notified ahead of the account service representatives. The order of two notifications became a scheduling decision: color work starts when the file arrives, not after a handoff.

One Branded Front Door for Artwork In and Proofs Out

Files.com became the single Belmark-branded surface where every customer file crosses the company line, in either direction.

The site and its login pages carry Belmark's branding, so a brand contact dropping off label art sees Belmark, not a file-transfer vendor. When a customer is onboarded and has new art, customer service sends a branded link for them to drop it through. Customers who will never become users transact through Files.com Inboxes, which accept files from people with no account and route each submission to the right place. Customers who prefer FTP or SFTP reach the same site, so their chosen intake method does not change where the files end up.

Coming back the other way, finished proofs are delivered through share links from the same branded site.

The prepress operation behind all of this did not move. Esko still drives prepress and proofing, with its Automation Engine connected to Files.com through API and webhook paths; Files.com carries the file exchange around it.

First Notification Goes to the Color Team

Belmark runs two groups against the exchange: a large, all-access group for the account service representatives who own each customer relationship, and a separate group for the color team. The color group gets first notification of any FTP upload. Per-folder email notifications fire the moment files land, so the color specialists begin working the art ahead of the account service reps.

Close to a Decade on One Exchange

With the exchange in production, Belmark replaced a customer file exchange scattered across an assortment of FTP sites with one branded portal, and the workflow has run there continuously for close to a decade.

• Customer service works in one place. Retrieving a customer's files means one Belmark site, not remembering which of many FTP servers a given customer used.
• Onboarding a new brand no longer adds a system. The next customer gets a branded link or an Inbox on the same site, so the exchange grows by a folder rather than by another FTP arrangement to maintain.
• Artwork gets worked earlier in the cycle, because the color team is on a file before the account side has picked it up.

“We're retrieving files for them instead of using all sorts of different FTP sites.”

A New Front Door, With Esko Still in Place

A brand with new label art now deals with one address that looks like Belmark, drops the file with nothing to install, and gets its proof back as a link from the same place. Inside the building, the color team is working that art before anyone has forwarded anything. Close to a decade ago, the same job started with a question: which FTP site is this customer's?

Belmark never rebuilt its prepress operation to fix its file exchange. Esko still makes the proofs; Files.com changed how files cross the company line. For a converter whose every job begins and ends with a customer's file, that boundary turned out to be the part that needed replacing.