ELLE MEDIA IS TO KICK OFF THE new year with a new press. The company, previously trading as FM Print and also known as Falder Matthews, is replacing its ten colour Komori Lithrone 28 with a Heidelberg XL106 five-colour plus coat. The machine arrives on 6 January, after the Komori has been shipped out.
The investment will increase capacity at the Basildon company thanks to faster running speeds and short makereadies, which managing director James Cuthbert intends to make full use of. “It’s hugely quicker than the Komori,” he says. “It’s an 18,000sph machine that we will be running at 18,000sph and make sure that we take advantage of all the make ready advantages.
“When we went to see it, we fully expected things to have moved on, but we hadn’t realised things had moved on that much.” The company had had some inkling because competitors with this generation of machine have been able to offer much keener pricing and remain profitable. As a consequence says Cuthbert, the industry is dividing. “It’s getting to the point where there’s a big gap between those able to offer the quality and the cost that the new technology delivers and those that haven’t got it.”
CUTHBERT HAS STEPPED UP TO BE managing director on a restructured board that comprises Bill Kellewey as operations director and Chris Hilleard as production with Bruce Cuthbert becoming executive chairman. Since moving to a 26,000sq ft factory, previously occupied by a company producing dashboard for Ford Motors, in 2010 and investing in a secondhand SM102 long perfector, sales have climbed from £2 million to £5 million.
As well as print, the Elle Media Group comprises a creative design arm and a greetings cards publishing business which contributes about 20% of sales says Cuthbert and “has been growing nicely”. The rest comes from commercial print, with a strong element of sustainability. The company has held ISO 14001 since 1997 and is able to carbon balance what it prints. This ethos led to specifying that the new press should be supplied as a carbon balanced machine by Heidelberg. “That is important to our customer base that comes to us for this reason,” he explains.
THE COMPANY IS SENDING STAFF TO Heidelberg at Brentford for training and will also train on the press once it is in place. “We have been offered help in training by a nearby printer that has an XL 106 and a minder who joined us in the summer already has experience on the XL 106,” says Cuthbert.
He is not rushing to the next stage of the investment plan, which may include looking at finishing and plate making capacity once the press is in operation. Before then, Elle will be looking at strengthening its MIS and its production workflow in order to get jobs to the press efficiently. “The newer MIS systems can cope with the ganging we do on cards and fulfilment as well,” says Cuthbert. “This is just the start of the investment plan.”
