The new StitchLiner was installed at the Poynton company last week by Horizon’s UK distributor IFS.

Managing director Matt Galloway said he had been looking at the StitchLiner for a while, with the time now right to upgrade its finishing setup after putting in place a number of previous investments including a five-colour Speedmaster CX102 with coater.

He said that although the Covid-19 pandemic had impacted last year’s growth plans, the business was bouncing back and currently “very busy”.

“The StitchLiner will alleviate some of the pinch points in the finishing department. It’s a flexible and versatile machine and ticked all the boxes for us,” he said. 

Galloways handles a lot of short- and medium-run brochure work, and has an average run length of 3,300 sheets. 

The 6,000bph StitchLiner is fully-automated saddle stitch, fold and trim system. It is configured with three high-capacity VAC-L600H collators with 130mm deep trays, with less time required for loading resulting in greater uptime. It also has a double-length delivery conveyor. 

Galloway went to see a StitchLiner MKIII in action at Flexpress in Leicester before pressing go on the £200,000 spend, which was  financed with a CBILS loan organised through Compass Business Finance.

He said the company also handled a lot of fulfilment work and would now be able to bring previously outsourced collating in-house on the Horizon, as well as avoiding time-consuming hand work.  

“Having the ability to chop and change jobs in just a few minutes will be game-changing in how we quote,” he explained.

“Customers don’t want to wait and these collators will help us be much faster so the deep trays will be ideal for the work we produce. It’s what our customers want and what’s expected in the market.”

The firm re-jigged its bindery layout and moved its existing Muller Martini stitcher in order to optimise logistics and workflow. All the existing finishing kit has been retained. 

The 33-staff business is currently tracking turnover of around £3m. 

“We’ve won a few nice contracts recently that should push us above where we were, pre-Covid,” Galloway said.  

The first batch of operators were trained last week, with training of a second set due to complete by the end of this week. 

The investment was part of a five-year plan at the 151-year-old family business, which offers a full range of services in-house from pre-press to digital, wide-format and litho printing as well as web-to-print.