The Northampton-based firm bought the three machines, which were installed in July, from Morgana. The total investment cost came to around £75,000.
Morgana first demonstrated the Italian-manufactured Valiani Mat Pro Ultra V at an open house earlier this year at its Milton Keynes premises, which is where Addison Print directors Adam Matthews and Ian Harper came across the device, having initially visited the event to purchase a new bookletmaker.
The cutting table, which has a 1.5x1m working surface, can be used to produce a blind embossing effect on board products and can cut through a variety of thicknesses.
“We saw what the Valiani could do and realised it was exactly what we needed for one specific area of work that we were producing on a regular basis,” said Matthews.
“We have a customer that is a major producer of lightbulbs. They use us to help them to produce a large variety of test packaging. That can involve a lot of awkward cutting tasks and expensive cutting formes.
“The Valiani is the ideal solution to the problem, as these marketing runs are just a few dozen copies. Of course, once we had seen what the machine could do we began thinking of an awful lot of other areas of work where the machine could be very useful.”
The company has already produced jigsaw products for a pre-school customer and has been asked to produce test packaging for brownie snack boxes for a major football club.
The machine has enabled the company to bring previously outsourced cutting work in-house.
“We sent out huge amounts of short-run die-cutting where we had to have a forme made and then pay for the die on top of the job and also pay for the first run. When you’re only talking about 100 or 200 sheets, it’s no different from having 1,000 sheets done,” said Matthews.
“Consequently, we’re putting that money straight back into the customer’s pocket, it keeps us going and it wins us work on the back of it because we’re more competitive.”
The business also bought a Vivid MX-530 laminator, which is suitable for matt, soft-touch and gloss lamination for both litho and digital production, and a Morgana System 2000 collator and bookletmaker, which is equipped with Morgana’s SquareFold unit.
“Our ageing bookletmaking equipment was in need of replacement. This latest machine is able to handle both un-collated and pre-collated work, as well as create a square-back finish to the final booklet,” said Matthews.
Addison Print, which has five staff and a turnover of £500,000, also operates a Xerox J75 SRA3 printer, a Mimaki solvent wide-format printer and a two-colour Ryobi 522 press with numbering and perforating.
The firm completes a wide variety of work for end-users and trade customers.
