Linda Cook and husband Ian Cook have led the Stockport-based company since they bought the firm in an MBO in 1995. It now has a turnover of around £2m.
Ian Cook said: “What appealed about the Mailmaster Compact is its simplicity. Operators can get into it more easily to fix or make adjustments without calling out an engineer.
“We are not a big mailing house; mostly our runs are up to 100,000, but typically they are anything from 2,000 to 40,000.
“We take on work that big mailing houses don’t want. These include the shorter runs and awkward mailings that we hand fill. Consequently we don’t need a large, high-volume machine.”
The 40-staff firm installed the £30,000 machine, which was bought direct from KAS Paper Systems, two months ago.
It joins 10 digital printers including two Konica Minolta bizhubs, an HP mono machine and small office machines from Ricoh. Other kit includes three other inserters and two poly-baggers.
The company offers direct mail fulfilment, data processing, and machine and manual fill services into paper envelopes and poly bags for small local, national and international companies.
“We had remained loyal to one manufacturer of inserting machines since we bought out the company,” Cook added. “However we were having reliability problems with the electronics.
“This new machine is perfect for whopping out 5,000 items an hour and we have always built our business on having three to five machines for a given job, so if one goes down we are not stuck. We have 70% optimisation, so there's room for more capacity.”
The Mailmaster is a compact DL to C4 production envelope inserter designed for easy set-up and quick changeovers, making it suitable for short-run work.
It is supplied with three automatic feeders and a hand-feed position as standard. The prime document feeder has an integral folder and the two insert stations handle a variety of documents.
“It’s a reliable, flexible workhorse. We operate it eight hours a day at between 4,000-5,000sph and it typically inserts three to four jobs with a quick changeover and set-up.
“About 95% of our jobs comprise a letter with one or two inserts so the Mailmaster Compact with two insert stations is ideal.
“However, we have other inserters that have three, four or six insert stations, so we are well equipped to handle every job that comes our way”, added Cook.
“The Mailmaster allows us to compete for more complex and higher volumes of work. We can now handle more jobs in-house that we would have hand-filled or sent to larger mailing houses.”
