The family run business, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, installed the £68,000 Mimaki JFX200-2513 EX at its Widnes, Cheshire site in mid-September.
It joined an existing Mimaki JVC30-160 roll-to-roll solvent printer.
Founder and managing director John Goodfellow said that he and the firm’s production director, his son Steve, looked at various options, including used machines, and visited several print operations to assess the technologies, but in the end the JFX-200 was a “no-brainer”.
“We looked at a couple of colleague printers that kindly let us have a look at their operation. It looked good and was attractive to us, there were a lot of time savings and time is money,” said John Goodfellow.
Launched last year, the entry level 35sqm/hr UV flatbed prints on substrates up to 2.5x1.3m in a wide variety of materials up to 50mm thick. It can run in various configurations up to six colours (CMYK, Lc and Lm) plus clear and white.
Prior to the flatbed’s arrival, the business produced jobs on its roll-to-roll solvent machine, waited for them to degas and then laminated and mounted on a board, but with the new flatbed, which was supplied by CMYUK, Steve Goodfellow said turnaround times had been improved: “We’re now probably 50% faster and 30% more profitable, and that’s just with our existing work.”
The business reconfigured its retail space, including a new physical storefront to better promote the business and open up its front office to make room for the new flatbed.
“As Steve said, we’ve a workshop down there and an office/reception, we make no money out of the office,” quipped Goodfellow senior.
He said one of the few positive outcomes of the pandemic was that with some of the office-based employees of the 10-staff firm now working from home, it had freed up the required space.
The investment has also opened a number of new opportunities for the business including trade printing of customised estate agent boards.
“It will allow us to carry out work we haven’t done before. It’s going to open up markets that we couldn’t even have applied for,” said Goodfellow.
The business has traded throughout the pandemic, albeit at times with a skeleton staff, primarily because a chunk of its work is producing Hazchem labels for the chemicals industry and HGV graphics which remained largely unaffected.
Three generations of Goodfellows work at the company, which is named after Steve Goodfellow's youngest daughter, with his son Chris the workshop manager. The business is running at around 50% of its pre-Covid levels, although John Goodfellow said “things were picking up”.
