With manufacturing and flexographic printing carried out at Heritage’s base in Blackburn, the i-Jet2 is set to be installed at Eagle’s 10,220sqm printing facility in Walsall in the summer, representing a six-figure investment.

Both representing the UK arm of German-headquartered envelopes conglomerate Mayer, Eagle and Heritage will jointly use the new inkjet system to introduce small-volume, quick-turnaround printed envelope work to its offering – a gap which has previously lost them potential business.

Heritage Envelopes sales director Phil Bryan said: “We recognised there is a gap emerging in the market for people who just need 2,000 envelopes or something like that, where most of our orders are usually around 15,000. With our kit, it is not cost-effective to produce a low volume, so we were not capturing those orders and we needed to address that.

“This machine fills that gap and we hope to catch not only the orders we were losing to competitors but also customers who had not considered printed envelopes before.

“We have considered this market for around two years, but we were convinced that the print quality on the machines was not to the standard our customers expect – now, with the i-Jet2 we believe we have found the right tech to launch into this market.”

Dutch manufacturer W+D’s Halm iJet2 is capable of printing up to 32,000 envelopes/hr at sizes from 89x152mm to C4 (324x229mm) in four colours with a resolution of 1,600x1,375dpi.

With a joint turnover circa £30m, Heritage and Eagle employ 160 people and, according to Bryan, are responsible for the production of a volume of envelopes equal to 20% of the volume of mail processed by the UK postal service.