The Duplo was installed two weeks ago and the Inprinting unit, which will be used for foiling, was purchased last week and will be installed on 27 October. Johnsons managing director John McMillan did not reveal how much he paid for the kit.
The purchases follow an upgrade to the company's HP press line-up in May, when it replaced an HP Indigo 5500 with an HP Indigo 7800.
McMillan said: “We’ve been getting more and more demand on the Indigo as we are doing more and more greetings cards. We are literally doing tens of thousands of greetings cards and publishers are looking for more innovation.
“The Foliant will give us the option to do short-run foiling on cards without having to have blocks made. We do traditional foiling in-house but if for instance we are doing a range of personalised birthday cards, we have to have personalised blocks made. Now we can just put the numbers in and run off the foil.”
The Inprinting unit was supplied by Intelligent Finishing Systems (IFS). It can be retrofitted to a number of Foliant laminators and applies foil or varnish to a pre-printed black toner. It currently has two other Heidelberg Platen foilers, which it will be keeping.
The DC-745 can four-trim and crease A4 sheets at a top speed of 50spm. It takes sheet sizes of up to 370x999mm and thicknesses of 350gsm.
“The Duplo system was an obvious fit. It is there to ease bottlenecks and take pressure off our current guillotine,” added McMillan.
Johnsons also runs a five-colour Heidelberg XL 75 in its Nantwich, Cheshire premises, along with various other bits of finishing kit.
Last year, the company opened up a second premises in Crewe, dedicated purely to wide-format. It spent £750,000 on the 280sqm industrial unit and kitted it out with an Agfa Anapurna M2500i hybrid inkjet printer, an Acorta flatbed cutter and an Asanti workflow solution.
McMillan said the £3m-turnover, 190-year-old outfit is considering hiring more staff and purchasing a second machine for the wide-format division, which has been doing “really well”.
