Fancy Walls did not start with a grand plan to reinvent wallpaper production.

There are plenty of Silicon Valley stories about companies starting in a garage. Fancy Walls started in an apartment. The Latvian company began with two people selling wallpaper through an Etsy store and outsourcing the printing. Before long, they installed their first printer in the apartment. They were literally cutting wallpaper by hand on the floor.

Necessity created a habit that has stayed with the company ever since: solve the problem in front of you and simplify where you can. If nobody else has built what you need, build it yourself.

Neither founder came from the printing industry. Ulams Mazulis, founder and Chief of Production, has a background in pharmacy. His cofounder and Chief Marketing Officer, Ivars Ščerbakovs, came from marketing. That may partly explain why they did not feel particularly bound by how things were normally done in the printing industry.

Instead, they approached each problem from first principles: What are we trying to achieve? How can we simplify it? And what can we automate?

Sometimes, that meant building or modifying equipment themselves. Other times, it meant writing their own software. From very early on, Fancy Walls invested in an internal CMS and automation around its production processes.

Over time, the apartment printer became multiple production devices, while automated finishing replaced manual cutting. Fancy Walls also increasingly standardised what it produced.

That standardisation is an important part of the company’s model. Fancy Walls makes wallpaper and remains deliberately focused on just that. Materials, widths, lengths, and packaging are standardised wherever possible. Rather than competing for every possible print job, the company focuses on doing one thing efficiently and to a very high standard.

A major step came with the move to Durst printing technology. Ulams recalls that printing a 100-meter roll could take around 12 hours on their previous equipment. With Durst technology, they could produce the same kind of job in roughly 80 minutes. Today, Fancy Walls relies exclusively on Durst printers for its wallpaper production.

As printing became faster, the next constraint shifted upstream. Fancy Walls needed to get each order from its software platform to a correctly prepared production file with as little human intervention as possible.

Fancy Walls has developed into an international print-on-demand and white-label production company. Around 80 percent of its output goes to the United States.

That focus can be seen throughout the business. Fancy Walls designs its product dimensions around US measurements. The company ships orders directly from Latvia, typically reaching US destinations within just a few days. A growing part of its volume comes from business customers selling wallpaper under their own brands.

For these customers, the goal is increasingly to provide more than printing. Fancy Walls also wants to provide much of the infrastructure they need to run a wallpaper business without building their own production operation.

Integrations with platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce, together with Fancy Walls’ own API, allow orders and production information to move directly between systems. The company is also developing tools for other parts of the process. Customers can upload designs, configure repeats and scaling, create room visualizations, define branded packaging, and prepare products for their own online stores.

In other words, Fancy Walls is gradually becoming the production platform behind other wallpaper businesses.

That makes production automation increasingly important. When a customer creates or sells a product through an online storefront, the production system must turn that order into a correctly prepared job. Nobody should have to manually translate between the digital storefront and the print floor.

Fancy Walls had already automated much of this process internally. Its existing solution used CSV data and Adobe scripting to prepare jobs. After years of development, the system was stable and reliable.

It worked well, but someone still had to download the CSV files and drop them into the right folder to begin processing. After a busy weekend, Monday morning could mean an hour or two of waiting for the backlog to clear.

The next step began almost by accident.

At FESPA in Barcelona, Fancy Walls stopped by the Durst Open Software Initiative area, where callas was also present. An initial conversation about production automation planted a seed. A few weeks later, Fancy Walls picked up that conversation again. The company started looking seriously at the next stage of its workflow.

callas introduced the company to Jan Suhr of Color Consult in Sweden. He is an experienced automation specialist working with both Enfocus Switch and callas pdfToolbox.

Like many automation projects, what appeared relatively straightforward from the outside became considerably more interesting once the details emerged. Fancy Walls already had a highly developed internal process that had evolved over years. Replicating that logic within a new automated workflow required a deeper understanding of the business. It meant understanding PDF processing, the company’s own software, production rules, and numerous exceptions.

One factor made the collaboration particularly effective: Fancy Walls has its own developers.

When the workflow needed a new endpoint, additional metadata, or a change in the company’s internal platform, the development team could implement it directly. Fancy Walls did not have to treat automation as an external system installed alongside the business. Instead, its own platform and the production workflow could evolve together. Within only a few months of the first conversation at FESPA, a substantial new workflow was up and running.

For Ulams, the moment when the value became obvious was remarkably simple. He could trigger a job from the Fancy Walls dashboard and have the platform send the job information into the workflow. Roughly 20 seconds later, the prepared file appeared in the production hot folder. That was the moment the somewhat alien world of Switch started to make sense.

The workflow continues to evolve as the team discovers new cases and exceptions, unusual filenames included. But that is also how Fancy Walls has always worked: implement, observe, improve, and automate the next problem.

For Fancy Walls, tools such as Switch and pdfToolbox are an investment. Ulams is equally direct about the return: “the gain is enormous.”

Routine production work that previously required manual attention can now happen automatically. Monday-morning backlogs no longer consume the same amount of staff time. Jobs can also move much more directly from the company’s own platform into production.

Beyond the time saved, the new workflow increasingly connects Fancy Walls’ software platform and print production as one system.

Most of the company’s customers are thousands of kilometres away, so Fancy Walls cannot rely on traditional print-shop interactions. Its systems must reliably connect e-commerce, customer data, file preparation, production, and logistics at scale.

That combination of focus, standardisation, and automation has transformed the business. Fancy Walls started with a printer in an apartment. Today, it is an international white-label wallpaper manufacturer.

And Fancy Walls is far from finished.

As Ulams said near the beginning of our conversation: “We still feel there is so much to do and so much to improve.” For Fancy Walls, that sounds less like a complaint and more like a promise.