Generation Next Franchise Brands, Inc. Acquires Print Mates™, Expanding Company’s Unattended Retail Portfolio
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SAN DIEGO, CA, April 09, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — via NEWMEDIAWIRE – Generation NEXT Franchise Brands, Inc. (OTCQB: VEND) announced today that it has reached terms to acquire the assets of Print Mates, LLC, a small team of entrepreneurs, software engineers, and photography professionals in San Diego that are on a mission to reinvent the premium-quality photo printing experience by making it fast, fun, and inexpensive to get your photos “out of your phone and into your hand” with the Print Mates™ Kiosk.
Nick Yates, CEO of Generation NEXT Franchise Brands, said that the Print Mates assets will be held by a wholly owned subsidiary of Generation Next which will operate separately with its own facilities, staff, and resources. “It is extremely important to us that Print Mates, or any acquisition, is mature enough and has the right team, product and supply chain to operate independently, as a wholly-owned but separate subsidiary. For us, anything less would have been a non-starter,” Yates said, noting that the nationwide rollout of the company’s flagship unattended franchising concept, Reis & Irvy’s, has both his and Generation Next’s “undivided attention.”
“Print Mates™ is a turn-key subsidiary for us. The team, facilities, manufacturing and product fulfillment; everything is in place. The Print Mates™ Kiosk perfectly complements our product portfolio, and is ready to ship. The timing of the acquisition was designed to allow us to be first to market with a complementary unattended retail concept that is even more autonomous than our flagship Reis & Irvy’s kiosks, requiring only about 30 minutes per month in human maintenance,” Yates said. “The ultimate goal however is to own and operate thousands of these replicating the Redbox/Coinstar model and the team at Print Mates has already established relationships and tests with the country’s largest retail, convenience and grocery chains.
Generation Next is assuming the liabilities of Print Mates, LLC in exchange for the assets. There is no cash consideration being paid by Generation Next to Print Mates or any of its members. The assets acquired include five patent applications, complete engineering documents for the kiosk, customer contracts, supplier agreements, intellectual property, and proprietary software. A contract with a Canadian licensee with a commitment to purchase $7,000,000 of Print Mates Kiosks over a 5-year term is part of the assets acquired by Generation Next. The liabilities assumed by Generation Next net of kiosk inventory value are approximately $300,000.
An Unfulfilled Demand in a Billion Dollar Industry
Due in large part to consumers’ adoption of the smartphone, at least 1.5 trillion photos are estimated to have been captured in 2018. Predictions to 2022 continue to show a compounded annual growth (CAGR) in that figure of greater than 10 percent, so that by 2022 the number of photos captured annually will grow to over 2.3 trillion. Print Mates™ is an innovative new way to monetize consumers’ craze for the phone camera.
Print Mates™ unattended kiosks are designed to reinvent the premium-quality photo printing experience by making it fast, fun, and inexpensive to get your photos “out of your phone into your hand,” while creating a low-to-no maintenance, extremely high margin business opportunity in unattended retail for entrepreneurs and retailers. Recent consumer research reports show that consumers in every age group – from tweens to Millennials; from Generation X to Baby Boomers – still desire to preserve their most cherished memories in high-quality photo prints. But until now, professional-quality, third party services that turned digital photos into prints were either too inconvenient, too slow, or too expensive for today’s consumer.
Print Mates™ easy-to-use, patented touchscreen kiosks are promising to close the loop on the consumer photo lifecycle, as well as drive much-needed foot traffic to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses ranging from supermarkets, grocery and drug stores to big box retailers, shopping malls, family fun centers, convenience stores, hotels, airports, and more. The Print Mates™ Kiosks put reliable and quality photo printing at customers’ fingertips while allowing independent operators and business owners to earn a very high margin from each sale. Customers love using the Print Mates™ Kiosk because they can instantly, easily and cost-effectively print high-quality photos directly from their smartphones or through their favorite social media (Facebook, Instagram, Google Photos, Dropbox, and Flickr) photo sharing, or cloud storage accounts in six different sizes of prints in just seconds.
Consumers can also conveniently order decor and other photo products, gifts and accessories ranging from frames, picture books, posters, jumbo-sized prints, and fridge magnets to beautiful canvas and wood prints and have them conveniently shipped to their home with just a few taps. A soon-to-be-released software update will also add an option for passport photos, a product many retailers are asked for daily.
“The team at Print Mates is solving another problem with a simple, unattended retail kiosk solution,” Yates said. “We all have hundreds, if not thousands, of photos stuck in our cell phones and stored on social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram. The only reason most of us don’t print them is because we don’t have a convenient way to do so, staring us in the face,” Yates continued. “Print Mates kiosks can be placed in any number of location categories, from grocery chains to hotels and big box retailers, just to name a few. And the kiosks earn extremely high margins on each sale with some products on the kiosks’ menu selling for as much as $125 dollars. The team at Print Mates has secured agreements to test the kiosks in some of the largest grocery, convenience and big box retail chains across the U.S., representing tens of thousands of potential locations, and our plan is to provide Generation Next, our shareholders, and our franchisees the exclusive opportunity to own, operate and share in the revenue provided by this extraordinary product,” Yates concluded.
Print Mates™ location partners will be supported by a unique marketing program that leverages Google Business to drive consumers in real time directly to their machines whenever they need to quickly and conveniently print their photos. If a customer types “photo printing” in to the google search engine, it will point them to the closest Print Mates retailer. The strategy will be paired with a national regional marketing program to create awareness of the Print Mates™ brand.
Item 404 of Regulation S-K requires disclosure of any transaction over $120,000 in which the Company is a participant and any related person has a direct or indirect material interest. “Related persons” include directors, nominees, executive officers, five percent shareholders and their immediate family members. The present acquisition of the assets of Print Mates, LLC is a related party transaction as the sole member of Print Mates, LLC, Franklyn Yates, is an immediate family member (Brother) of Nicholas Yates, the CEO and Chairman of Generation Next Franchise Brands, Inc. The transaction has been duly authorized by the Board of Directors of the Company who have been informed of the related party interest.
Generation NEXT Website: www.gennextbrands.com
About Generation NEXT Franchise Brands, Inc.
Generation NEXT Franchise Brands, Inc., based in San Diego, California, is a publicly traded company on the OTC Markets trading under the symbol OTCBB: VEND. Generation NEXT Franchise Brands, Inc. is parent company to Reis and Irvy’s Inc, 19 Degrees Corporate Service LLC and Print Mates.www.gennextbrands.com
About Print Mates
Print Mates™ was formed by a team of entrepreneurs, engineers, and photography professionals in San Diego that are on a mission to reinvent the premium-quality photo printing experience by making it fast, fun, and inexpensive to get your photos “out of your phone and into your hand” with the Print Mates™ Kiosk – and creating a golden opportunity for retailers in the process.
Print Mates’™ easy-to-use, patented touchscreen kiosks are promising to close the loop on the consumer photo lifecycle, as well as drive much-needed foot traffic to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses ranging from supermarkets, grocery and drug stores to big box retailers, shopping malls, family fun centers, hotels, airports and more.
The company began a nationwide expansion in 2019 by offering retailers, business owners and forward-thinking retailers across the country an opportunity to own a piece of an emerging multi billion-dollar industry.
Print Mates™ Kiosks and ever-expanding product line of photographic decor, gifts, prints and accessories are proudly Made in the USA.www.printmates.com
About Reis & Irvy’s, Inc.
Reis & Irvy’s, Inc. is a subsidiary franchise concept of Generation NEXT Franchise Brands, Inc. (VEND). Launched in early 2016, the revolutionary Reis & Irvy’s Vending Robot serves seven different flavors of frozen yogurt, ice cream, sorbets and gelatos, a choice of up to six custom toppings, and to customers within 60 seconds or less at the point of sale. The unique franchise opportunity has since established itself as a high-demand product and currently showcases a franchise network both domestically as well as internationally. www.reisandirvys.com