The Leicester-headquartered direct mail printer bought the high-speed window patching unit from an undisclosed envelope machinery manufacturer for £250,000. It was installed onto the inline finishing system of an existing Zirkon Press two months ago.
Earlier this year the firm invested £2m in two JWR 30K paper wrappers from CMC Machinery as part of its digital envelope mailpack product launch in March. The company can now create an envelope from a pre-printed reel that looks like an envelope rather than a one-piece mailer.
“The window patching unit investment was made to complement the CMC envelope wrapping lines. If we have a very large multimillion-copy order, it can be done much quicker on an inline system than on a CMC envelope wrapping line,” said operations director Ifor Pedley.
“We can replicate a C5, DL or even a C4 envelope completely on the line. We can put a window in it and in essence it will look just like an envelope with a letter inside.”
The new windowed format enables personalisation live at the time of production, with the windows able to be changed to create bespoke and personalised products to encourage recipients to open the envelopes.
“We can now create the letter on the inside with the address, and an outer window so that you can see the letter inside,” said Pedley.
“To my knowledge, there’s nobody else in the world that has put a window applicator onto an inline finishing system, not even in the US where they have a lot of inlines.”
The company, which has a turnover of £37m and is celebrating its 21st anniversary this year, also recently spent £3m on two HP T-series high-speed colour inkjet presses to boost its digital capacity.
