The machine, which cost roughly £120,000 and was supplied by EFI reseller CMYUK, was installed in the firm's Scarborough Street premises last Monday (24 July) and is expected to be up-and-running this week. EFI confirmed to PrintWeek that it was the first UK installation.
A Canon Océ Arizona flatbed has been taken out of the site that has now had around £300,000 worth of kit installed in the past 18 months, including a second Zünd G3 cutter and an HP Latex 360.
John E Wright is an official supplier for the Hull UK City of Culture 2017 celebrations and has seen an upsurge in work since it started printing for it. It received a 20% grant from the Humber Local Enterprise Partnership programme to fund payment for the machine, a grant that can be obtained if the company can prove it will provide jobs growth. Four John E Wright apprentices have recently been taken on full time and the site now has 18 staff and sales of £1.3m.
John E Wright managing director Tony Barnett first saw the machine in March when it was shown as a prototype at Sign & Digital UK on the CMYUK stand.
“It came into Hull to support growth and is very much down to the City of Culture work, which has given us the momentum to place this sort of investment,” said Barnett.
“We’re already investing in the people and now are just trying to pick up the machinery. We’ve been taking apprentices on and are now offering them full-time jobs. It’s a virtuous circle with the City of Culture, they tend to encourage you to take on apprentices.”
The machine, which has LED lamps, can print at 91sqm/hr in express mode, more than double that of its predecessor, the H1625. It has six ink channels, CMYK plus double-hit white, handling flexible and rigid substrates up to 1.6m wide and 50mm thick.
It prints photographic images at 1,200dpi using variable-drop greyscale option capability and runs off an EFI Fiery XF RIP.
Barnett added: “The quality of the heads is fantastic. We’ve got the bigger Vutek in Nottingham, which is our main site, and we’re trying to build Hull up into something of that order, to create a single graphics company to do Hull proud and compete on an equal footing with the big boys out of Leeds and Bradford.
“It’s doing £1.3m turnover but there is no reason it can’t do £2m soon.”
The Hull site, which was formed in its current iteration after a merger four years ago between the 90-staff group and display supplier Bartuf, is one of six John E Wright sites, the other five being in Nottingham, Derby, Leicester, Coventry and Oxford. The site runs two Latex 360s, along with wide-format finishing equipment.
John E Wright also owns a number of companies purchased in M&A deals, most recently Instaprint in Nottingham.
