Schools design online. Families add their own pages. A tree gets planted for every book sold. After 15 years and 10 million yearbooks, the model is no longer the bet - it's the standard.
Walk into a yearbook room at a middle school in Ohio this spring and the rhythm has changed. There is no sales rep in a polo. No flatbed of identical hardcovers stacked on a loading dock, waiting for parents who never paid to pick them up. There is a teacher, a few student editors, a browser tab, and a deadline. Somewhere in California, a print queue is processing books with different last names and slightly different pages - each one the same as every other yearbook, except for the two pages that are not.
That tab belongs to Treering, a Redwood City company that turned a stubbornly analog product into a piece of software with a printing press attached. The schools pay nothing. The parents who want a book buy a book. The book that ships is, in a small but specific way, theirs.
The founding story is, fittingly, a small one. Co-founder Chris Pratt's daughter brought a yearbook home. She appeared in it twice. Two pictures over an entire school year - barely an appearance, really, more of a cameo. Aaron Greco, another co-founder, has told the story this way: the book didn't capture her memories. It captured someone else's idea of her year.
That is the diagnosis Treering built a company on. The traditional yearbook had three problems pretending to be features. It was uniform when childhood is anything but. It was ordered in bulk months in advance, which meant schools either overprinted (waste) or underprinted (a parent's apology email). And it was sold by sales reps who, charming as they were, didn't tend to ask whether the supply chain was on fire.
Kevin Zerber, a software architect with a long career running from MultiMate to Lotus cc:Mail to E*TRADE, founded the company in 2009. The thesis was unglamorous in the way good theses tend to be. If yearbook design lived in the cloud, and printing lived on demand, you could let families add pages to their own copies without anyone else seeing them. You could print exactly what was ordered. You could give schools the tools for free, because the model was direct to consumer.
The other half of the bet was the name itself. Treering - the concentric rings of a tree, year stacked on year. The company committed early to planting a tree with Trees for the Future for every yearbook sold. It was a charming idea in 2009. It has aged into a serious one.
Strip everything else away and Treering's product trick is two pages. Every family that orders a book gets up to two pages of their own, dropped into their copy and no one else's. The school yearbook stays the school yearbook - the cover, the staff portraits, the dance, the field trip, the editor's letter. But woven into each printed copy is a small, private supplement of the kid whose name is on the order.
Around that core sits a real piece of software. Cloud-based design with customizable templates. Online editing for student editors who shouldn't have to learn Adobe just to lay out a page. Themes, fonts (including dyslexia-friendly ones, which is the kind of detail that gives away who is actually paying attention). E-signatures. Custom ad sales for fundraising. A support team and a curriculum for yearbook advisors, who, it should be said, did not sign up to be production managers when they took a teaching job.
The case for Treering is not a deck. It's a printer running and a forest growing. The company has not raised since 2015 - notable in a software era where the rounds tend to keep coming - and yet ended up on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, ranked #346 among software businesses.
Treering's stated mission is to update the yearbook industry with inclusivity, flexibility, and sustainability. Read it slowly. Three words that sound like a press release until you check what each one is doing.
Inclusivity is the personalized pages, the dyslexia-friendly fonts, the kids who used to get two photos and now get a chapter. Flexibility is the print-on-demand model, which means a school of 40 doesn't get treated like a school of 4,000 and vice versa. Sustainability is the tree per book, which started as marketing and is now, at four million trunks, something closer to a forest the company is genuinely answerable for.
The company has also taken on partnerships that go beyond the printer - notably with Sandy Hook Promise, supporting school safety programs. A yearbook company adjacent to a school safety nonprofit is the kind of pairing that only makes sense once you understand what schools actually ask of Treering when no one is listening.
Concentric rings of a tree. A year stacked on a year stacked on a year. Memory as growth ring.
Two custom pages per family. The school's book stays the school's book. Everything else changes.
Zero cost to schools. One tree per book. Ten million books printed and counting.
Trees for the Future, the partner, plants in West Africa as part of regenerative agroforestry. Not a logo move.
Personalized print, on demand, at a price that doesn't require waste - the yearbook is one of the cleaner places to prove that out, because the demand for a book about your kid is real and the tolerance for one that doesn't have your kid in it is, increasingly, not. In 2025 the company launched Treering Memories, a product expansion that hints at the obvious next chapter: capture what happens, then print what people actually want.
It is tempting to call Treering an education company, and it is. It is just as easy to call it a sustainability company, and it is that too. The cleanest description is also the most modest: it is a software company that quietly fixed a printed product nobody else thought needed fixing.
Walk back into that yearbook room in Ohio. The teacher closes the browser tab. The book is in the queue. Months from now, a kid will open it. She will see her face on a page only she has, sandwiched into a book her whole school shares. Somewhere in West Africa, a tree she will never meet will be a little taller. The book on her desk will weigh exactly as much as a book about her ought to.