“We’re looking more and more like a Duplo showroom,” joked Dave Rushton, co-managing director at Print Work.
The firm took delivery of a DBM-700 bookletmaker and DC-618 multi-finisher with DC-F100 in-line folder in August, helping the e-commerce business open up capacity at its finishing department and maintain same-day lead times.
The machines joined three existing multi-finishers, a DC-618, a DC646 and an older DC645 at the company, all bought through UK Duplo dealer CJB.
“We’ve always focussed on really short-run, sometimes single-sheet orders, so they’ve been a perfect solution,” said Rushton.
“I’ve always been happy with their machines, and they’re so unfussy with materials: so as we’ve achieved growth and print volumes, I’ve just added more. They work brilliantly.”
Print Work was established by Rushton and co-managing director Nick Goodliff as a side project to their e-commerce design agency Hypergram just prior to the pandemic, and has grown swiftly.
Now employing 23 staff, the firm prints using a 2021 Kodak NexFinity and a 2023 HP Indigo 7900 press, with the burden slowly shifting over to the Indigo as the NexFinity is phased out.
“Before the pandemic, we were doing maybe 10-15 orders a day, just to pay for the printer,” Rushton told Printweek.
“Then when the pandemic hit, we thought we might have to call time for a while – but the opposite happened.”
Swamped under orders for Etsy projects, tattoo studio artwork and other small businesses, Print Work soon went up to around 100 orders per day within three months; soon, it had to take on staff and better machinery, and the business became a serious concern, moving into a 420sqm warehouse.
Specialising in recycled and unusual materials, the business puts its machines through their paces.
“We have a material made from agricultural waste, a few that work really nicely made from cotton fibres – people really like the backstory, and it’s not the standard options you usually see with digital options, like matte or gloss,” Rushton said.
“We’ve always pushed it from day one with [our first machine,] the Konica Minolta. I think the engineers must have hated us: we were pushing all sorts of random stuff through it.
“Maybe we weren’t technically getting the best results, but they looked really nice.”
The company has been seeing consistent 30% year-on-year growth, and is aiming for sales of more than £2m by June 2025, its eighth year in business.
Behind this success has been the firm’s custom workflow, developed in-house.
“Essentially, everything from the front-end of the website all the way through to quality checking and packing is done on the same iPad-based app,” Rushton said.
“It works really well, and actually does a lot of the JDF imposition templates on the fly. It gives customers updates all the way through, directly telling them where their order has got to, as well.”
Rushton and Goodliff are eyeing expansion at a sensible pace.
“We’re focusing on manageable growth,” Rushton said.
“After that initial experience of scrambling around in the pandemic, trying to manage the whole process, it was quite a daunting proposition. So we’re adding to the business, slowly but surely.”
