They didn’t have an IT department to call. They didn’t have a helpdesk, or a provisioning workflow, or a colleague who had done this before. They had a printer, a QR code, and about twelve minutes of patience.

We had already been partnering with Zebra for years. We’d worked through the experimentation, the product iterations, the quiet R&D that rarely gets written up anywhere. We knew their world. But this was a different case. Small business owners have a completely different outlook.

Zebra’s hardware was built for IT departments. Their new customers had never met one. We built a new onboarding experience. One that worked for someone setting up a printer on a kitchen table, not someone running enterprise infrastructure.

Scan a QR code. Connect to Wi-Fi. Set up the device. Get to the first print. The goal was to make that sequence feel inevitable, not like a process, but like the product working the way it obviously should. Every step had to feel familiar and intuitive, even if you’d never done it before.

Beyond onboarding, we integrated a third-party label designer, built real-time communication between the app and the printer, and developed a notification system that let users monitor printer status live. The whole product experience, built for the person in front of it.

When Zebra’s internal team took it over, we stepped back. When it returned to us years later for ongoing support, new features and continued development, we were ready. That’s what a long relationship looks like. Not a handover. A partnership that picks up where it left off.