In 2015, James Berdigans, Artis Kehris, and Gatis Dukurs were running a small custom phone case e-commerce business in Riga, Latvia. Whenever orders surged from different countries, they struggled with high international shipping costs and multi-week delivery delays. Berdigans realized that instead of shipping a physical t-shirt across the Atlantic Ocean, the digital design file should be transferred instantly over the internet and printed by a local print shop near the customer. Entering the 500 Startups accelerator in San Francisco, they built a software platform that aggregated independent commercial print shops into a unified global API. In 2021, their revolutionary vision attracted Sir Richard Branson and Index Ventures, establishing Printify as a global tech powerhouse.