At the Shutterfly facility in Plano, Texas, just north of Dallas and one of eight around the country, every holiday card or custom photo book starts as a large-format sheet of B2 paper.
Here are families on Christmas morning, there are beachside sunsets, visits to Grandma — all rapidly feeding through the massive presses.
Stacked tall on wooden pallets, each sheet — about 20-by-28 inches — is fed through an HP Indigo 100K Digital Press that mixes cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink to build the image. On the other side, the press, which is about the size of a US Army tank, stacks the sheets onto another pallet, where they’re carried off to be trimmed. Every custom-ordered item includes a barcode that tracks it through the massive facility on its way toward the final steps: slotting into iconic orange packaging, and sorting to be shipped all over the southern United States.