Investing £20,000, the Ellesmere Port-headquartered firm brought its lamination services in-house at the end of 2017 to eliminate the delays to turnarounds caused by outsourcing.
The new machine was taken on board following an onsite demonstration observed by DDL director and technical services manager Greg Girard.
He said: “The MX-370P is very versatile with its range of capabilities, including the foiling and lamination, which allow us to provide a higher grade of finish for customers.
“One of our customers has a business based on A5 postcards and they wanted an improvement on their finish, so we used the machine’s lamination to give 400gsm stock the feel of 450gsm as well as a very nice sheen.
“We can run anything from A3 down to business cards through the MX-370P and it joins our selection of polywrapping machines, folding and insertion equipment to give us a full range of finishing capabilities especially suited to direct mail.”
Leicestershire-based Vivid’s Matrix MX-370P laminates at a maximum speed of 10m/min with a warm-up time of 10 minutes. It is intended for short-to-medium runs and is designed with a built-in touchscreen for simplified operation.
At DDL, it will run in tandem with the Omni-Flow feeder which has a 180mm stack depth designed for easy swap-over of paper stocks and unattended operation.
DDL’s Vivid install followed the purchase of a 110ppm Ricoh Pro C9100 digital printer with 700mm banner sheet option.
The two investments further support DDL’s increased focus on programmatic direct mail which Girard said was seeing a “rise as a method to contact customers”.
“Response rates are through the roof when our customers utilise personalised direct mail methods,” he said. “We also want to enhance our web-to-print by increasing the use of web portals for customers to upload their own images and PDFs.”
DDL Group, which has a second base in Dunoon, Scotland, employs a core team of 30 staff with seasonal work seeing the number rise as high as 100 workers when required. The group turns over £2.2m.
