The two machines, the bizhub Press 2250 and Watkiss Powersquare bookletmaker, came into the education stationery specialist's Kendal, Cumbria premises around two months ago, along with an Autobond laminator, for a combined investment figure of around £175,000.
GHP is the first in the UK to take the bizhub and Powersquare running in-line and with more than 10 paper decks the bizhub is the most highly specified of its type in the country.
Managing director Keith Young said he had opted for an in-house print production facility after receiving numerous requests for personalisation, having previously outsourced standard series exercise book jobs and only carried out overprinting of covers in-house, using a specially manufactured inkjet machine.
The demand for bespoke exercise books has in the main come from schools, especially academies, personalising books in order to demonstrate their marking methods to Ofsted inspectors, using specific tick or comment boxes.
Young said: “We’ve been selling these exercise books for a number of years now and have been on a simple inkjet process but more and more of the customers were coming back wanting bespoke exercise books.
“I knew there was a market but since we’ve gone into it I didn’t know how big it was. We’ve been selling exercise books for 25 years, we’ve got a wide customer base who know us and know our products and the initial response has been overwhelming.”
Young added that in the first five weeks, the machine has produced more than a million impressions, exceeding his expectations by a couple of months.
The bizhub prints at a maximum speed of 250ipm A4 duplex at 1,200dpi resolution. It takes paper at a maximum size of 320x480mm, weighing between 40gsm and 350gsm.
“We’ve leapfrogged some competitors because some commercial competitors doing this kind of work are still doing it litho, but with digital technology you can produce every page in a book differently, producing one book quite economically,” added Young.
GHP has experienced a period of growth in the past two years, in which it has almost doubled staff numbers to 54 and has seen its £6.2m turnover rise by just shy of 20%. Around 60% of turnover is made up from exercise book sales, while turnover from online sales has almost tripled during the period. It also sells stationery, paper and card, and offers wide-format services.
