Since replacing its previous Durst Tau 330 in December, the 21-staff business has experienced improvements across the board, commercial director Stewart Serls told Printweek.
Opting to stay with Durst, the business purchased a new, circa-£500,000 Tau 330 RSC E single-pass inkjet five-colour press CMYK plus white with chiller unit.
He said: “We’re seeing incredible results with better print quality, speed, efficiency and ink saving; it’s an absolute win-win from our side.
“This is a huge investment for a small, independent business like us but we feel it’s really important to keep investing and we are holding our own in today’s tough market.”
Not only is it a boost in print speed and quality from 600 to 1200dpi, but the new press has expanded the range of substrates the business is able to work with such as clear-on-clear polypropylene.
“With the inkjet, it’s the closest you get to screen printing," explained Serls. "There's hardly any difference in quality. We see many benefits from our investments. First, the 1200 dpi makes one heck of a difference in terms of quality, and the white provides opacity and allows other colours to become stronger.”
He added: “The Durst complements alternative technologies, can easily register with other machines and now prints applications that account for around 35% of our business in terms of sales. Another commercial advantage is the Ink Save Mode from Durst, which we believe will make significant cost savings over a traditional CMYK press as we expand even more into digital production.”
Looking ahead this year, Serls, who leads the £2m-turnover company with managing director Debbie Mellett and operations and production manager Paul Holder, said the company will head to Labelexpo where it is looking to invest in a replacement for its semi-rotary letterpress machine as well as a possible spend on inspection camera technology.
Furthermore, he said the leadership team was looking to boost its workforce in Q3 by taking on one or two apprentices, for the printroom and estimating/sales divisions, through the BPIF scheme.
