White aims to be a one-stop shop and the reason is simple: “Transport is often the biggest cost for any outsourced print job,” he says. “Fuel prices are going up and lots of clients are concerned about the environment, so the instinct is to keep it local. And turnround times are dropping, which adds to the pressure. If a job has to go to three different places to be laminated, stitched and drilled, it racks up the miles and the clock’s always ticking. The big finishers are struggling right now because of that. It’s very attractive to customers if they send us a pallet of work and we can do it all here.”
‘Here’ is a 460 sqm unit sitting on an industrial estate in Dronfield, Derbyshire. In 2007, it’s packed with finishing kit, but as White says, it wasn’t always that way: when the firm first moved in six years ago, other than the original folder and guillotine, DW had only a Muller Martini 221 stitcher.
“I think that stitcher was the biggest investment risk we’ve taken. It was just me at the time, no staff, and trying to convince the bank to lend me that kind of money for a market I wasn’t already in, was almost impossible,” White says.
The risk, however, paid off: by the end of the year, DW was pulling in longer-run work from bigger clients, had taken on two staff and had a sound basis for future investment. All profits have been ploughed back into the firm and it now operates a Shoei B2 buckle folder, a Stahl B1 six-plate combination folder, two Heidelberg die-cutting and creasing cylinders, a 115cm Schneider guillotine, a Horizon four-clamp perfect binder, a four-hole drill and a hand-stitcher for loop stitching.
A mobile knife unit can be used for endorse-folding – the term given to folding pre-stitched or pre-folded booklets in half.
With a small team, most staff are trained to operate most equipment. White’s brother Russell joined the company four years ago with a brief to become an expert on every machine – knowledge he passes on to less-skilled staff.
Two years ago, White decided to invest in some more automated stitching kit, and bought a Horizon StitchLiner – a vertical collator plus stitching line and three-knife trimmer with automated makeready. The StitchLiner heralded DW’s move into digital and short-run work. “Digital’s going massive,” White says, “the amount of digital work we do is growing all the time. We’re a lot better off doing 50 small jobs a day than one big one.” Having both the manually set-up 221 and the automated StitchLiner means DW is flexible: “We can do the big runs as well as doing the 50-copies jobs,” White says.
Building on this short-run expertise, White’s long-term plan is to be profitable down to five copies. “We’re training staff to be mindful that every copy is precious on makeready, and focusing on cutting waste. But automation is the key. Automated makeready is where the money is in short-run,” he says.
DW’s next investment, due to take place in May, is in laminating and wire-binding facilities. “That’s just about everything – once we’ve got that, we’ll be completely kitted out to provide for the requirements of our current customer base,” White says.
DW AT A GLANCE
Location Dronfield, Derbyshire
Turnover £300,000+
Sectors trade finishing: stitching, cutting, die-cutting, creasing, saddle-stitching, bookletmaking, laminating, wire-binding, drilling
Kit Muller Martini 221 stitcher, Horizon StitchLiner, Heidelberg cylinders, Schneider guillotine, Shoei and Stahl folders
Chasing business to the ?nishing line
Darren White was just 21 when he bought a secondhand Shoei folder and a little Camco guillotine to set up his own trade finishing house, DW Print Finishing. At such a tender age, in such a cut-throat market, all he had on his side was five years experience of working at two local trade finishing houses but that was enough to give him a thorough grasp of the market and its requirements. That knowledge has taken DW to a staff of 12 and a turnover of more than 300,000 in seven years.
