Davis Siksnans treated Printful's CEO seat as a nine-year bookend

The story

On his public site, Davis Siksnans does not lead with a garage origin story. He leads with the jobs in sequence: chief executive at Mapon since 2024, co-founder and former chief executive at Printful from 2013 to 2022, and a one-line claim that Printful was the first Latvian unicorn. He calls himself a receiver of the Order of the Three Stars, which he describes as Latvia's highest civilian honor, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 listee. The Printful line on the same page is a departure metric, not a founding myth: print-on-demand, around $300 million by the time he left. That figure is his, dated to an exit from the chair, not to a catalog year.

The sentence he put on the record when he actually left is more specific about the clock. In a June 2022 Printful announcement, Siksnans said he had been with the company from pre-revenue to nearly $300 million in annual sales, called it a natural bookend to nine years, and said he was proud to have helped build the first unicorn from Latvia. He was stepping down as chief executive with immediate effect, moving to a senior advisor role at Draugiem Group, while chief operating officer Zane Levsa became interim CEO. Co-founder and chairman Lauris Liberts thanked him, in the same release, for taking Printful from a start-up to a global leader. Those are company remarks around his quote, not a substitute for it.

A few days earlier, Management Today had him still in the chair, answering a question other chief executives pad with people platitudes. Competitive advantage, he said, was vertical integration. "We own the entire production process, from controlling the quality of product and print technology to fulfilment and shipping." The model he described is subscription-free for partners: Printful prints, packs, and ships; the merchant keeps design and marketing; each order is two transactions. No minimums, in the magazine's paraphrase of the model. What this record keeps is his ownership claim over production, not a journalist's revenue estimate sitting in the same article.

He was equally concrete about what merchants get wrong. "Many start-ups believe their product is so great it will sell itself but even the best product won't sell unless the right people know about it." One of the first internal moves, the profile says, was a Facebook advertising budget. He told the same interviewer he had learned from Amazon's habit of putting fulfillment closer to customers. "We are following that in our own way, although I wish we had started earlier." Fulfilment sites then spanned Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Latvia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as listed in that piece. He also said cross-border teams needed to meet in person, and that onboarding had lagged expansion.

The creator-economy line he gave Forbes, as quoted in the same profile, is about demand rather than factory math. Younger buyers, he said, want to stand out; they are not buying as many branded items from Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, or H&M, and are buying smaller brands and printed apparel. Viral merchandise, the magazine noted, can spike overnight. Siksnans' job, in that telling, was to own print quality and shipping so a meme did not die in a family print shop without an API. That is a systems answer. It is not a claim about a particular year's audited sales.

Decision speed is the other habit attached to his name. His mantra, the profile says he has stated, is to decide when you are 60 to 70 percent certain. Printful had been largely self-funding, which he treated as the right to choose. The same article reports a May 2021 growth investment from Bregal Sagemount. That round size and board seat are the magazine's reporting, not a number he recited in the quoted answers, so this story does not convert them into his metrics. What he did claim, later, is the unicorn label and the sales bookend when he left the CEO job.

The biography under the Printful years is short on his own site and should stay that way here. He lists Draugiem Group as a factory of 100 startups over 22 years, Draugiem Capital as an investment vehicle, and a stack of angel and fund names that belong to a later chapter. Mapon is the operating job he dates to 2024: fleet-management software, described as a scale-up at €24 million-plus. That euro figure is his listing for Mapon, not Printful, and it is not independently checked here. The useful contrast is role, not a blended revenue soup.

Read against an earlier Mixergy-style origin, this is a different cut of the same career. The question this record asks is not how a garage printer became a large fulfillment network. It is how a co-founder describes leaving: nine years, pre-revenue to nearly $300 million in annual sales, Latvia's first unicorn, then advisor, then another CEO seat. Vertical integration and Amazon-like proximity are the operating ideas he was willing to put in a British management magazine while still in the job. The $300 million class of number appears as his exit language, twice, in slightly different words.

None of those sales lines are audited in this file. "Around $300 million" on a personal homepage and "nearly $300 million in annual sales" in a company statement are founder-adjacent claims with the same order of magnitude and the same lack of an outside audit here. They should not be flattened into a single catalog year, and they should not be replaced with a more precise figure that he did not put in those two texts. Employee counts and lifetime item totals that appear in the 2022 press release without his byline stay out of the metric table.

What remains is a succession story with a manufacturing thesis. Siksnans presents Printful as a company that owned print through ship, sold a no-minimum partner model, and needed marketing as much as product. He presents himself as someone who took the CEO job from 2015, in the company's telling, through a unicorn label, then closed the book at nine years. Mapon is the next operating sentence on his own page. The editorial caution is simple: keep the bookend in his words, keep Latvia's first unicorn as his pride claim, and do not smuggle a different interview's garage chronology into this cut.