Where The Trade Buys (WTTB) has launched a subscription-based artwork and design service for its resellers, to help them meet varying levels of demand.

The service, called Artworker+, went live this week, and will put a creative team at the disposal of companies that currently outsource their design work, or who miss out on work because of limited capacity.

Gary Peeling, CEO of WTTB and its parent the Precision Proco Group, told Printweek: “Fundamentally, it’s an elastic way to scale your graphic arts team.

“A lot of our customers at WTTB are operating with limited staff numbers in their artwork, design, and repro teams.

“What this does is allow you to deal with the ebbs and flows of demand in a more elastic fashion.”

By putting the service on a project management platform, Peeling said that WTTB hopes to “uber-ise” the freelance process by making it simpler and easier to access a pool of available workers.

Artworker+ has five levels of subscription, the first of which costs £175 per month for up to 20 hours of work. For more resource-intensive clients, the top, ‘Pro’, bracket costs £1,049 per month for 120 hours of work and up to five concurrent projects.

Companies will be able to request unlimited amendments to the work.

Peeling added that businesses would be able to pick and choose their level to accommodate fluctuating levels of demand.

He said: “You can skip into the service and skip out of it.

“I think that’s the number one benefit: not to miss out on opportunities, either because you’re over capacity, or your team has a temporary absence of some sort with holiday or sickness.”

The current employment environment has made it difficult for businesses to attract and hold onto in-demand workers like designers, too, Peeling said.

According to ONS figures, the UK now has more vacancies than unemployed people, making for fierce competition for workers.

At the same time, Peeling said, many companies are still recovering from Covid: “They’re rightly cautious to overextend their permanent team beyond their regular demand.

“What this allows you to do is to maintain your core team and scale when you need it, which is a much more efficient way of doing it.”

WTTB has offered a free fortnight-long trial of the service for its first 200 customers.