"Our customers are asking us how to go digital," he said. "Our target is small- and mid-size printers. In our backyard we've got 5,000 customers."
Service and support will be the firm's biggest selling points. It has already signed up its first customer, quickprint chain PPL. The chain has 17 branches along the M4 corridor and has signed a three-year £1.2m deal for the servicing of its 32 Canon digital printers.
Former Canon UK marketing operations manager for graphic industries Kerry Button has been appointed Duplo digital print division manager.
"Canon carried out a business review and concluded its focus was the corporate market – it couldn't support the luxury of a niche market," said Button.
He met Greenhalgh while looking for a company that could handle Canon products in the commercial print market.
Before launching the digital division Button spent six weeks on the road researching what commercial printers wanted from digital print and a digital print supplier.
The product range being sold at the moment is Canon's black-and-white printers from 60-105ppm and colour CLCs from 11-50ppm.
Duplo decided to focus on this end of the market to begin with as it felt customers would prefer a low-cost low-risk approach.
T/R Systems and EFI Velocity clustering software allows customers a simple way to add extra printing capacity if their digital business takes off.
"We've got customers who've started small in finishing and migrated," said Greenhalgh.
The new division is not Duplo's first foray into digital. It has previously had a stab at the wide-format market selling HP printers under its BizMax scheme.
"We've learnt from our mistakes with BizMax," said Greenhalgh. One of the problems with that scheme was that Duplo signed the deal with HP in Germany, but didn't have the same relationship with the UK office. The new operation is dealing with Canon UK.
Story by Barney Cox
