Blissetts has made the most of a move from its home of 60 years in Acton, installing a new Xerox iGen5 in a new factory in Brentford.
The business reached its centenary last year, though celebrations were unsurprisingly muted. Now its former factory is a pile of rubble and the business has settled in to a modern two-storey building close to Sky Television.
“It was a very big move for us,” says managing director Chris Blissett. “Now we have the right power, a new floor plan and it is a much nicer brighter, working environment.”
Ahead of the move at the start of the year, the company took delivery of an iGen5, upgrading from the iGen4 it had previously used. This would have been expensive to move from the old factory and Xerox made it easy to upgrade. “It was a no brainer,” he says. “We looked around, looked at the Iridesse and the latest Konica Minolta machines, thinking that the choice and technology on smaller machines had moved on a lot.”
Its need for reliability, consistent quality and uptime, however, led it back to the larger production focused machine.
The alternative would have been two smaller machines, says Blissett, which in reality was not much of an option for the types of work that the company handles. “We needed to have the uptime. We had a Versant 2100 and if it stops, we would need to call an engineer. If the iGen breaks down, we can get into the guts of the press, and we can be back running much more quickly more often than not.
“And we had looked at the Indigo when we bought the iGen4. It’s a good machine, but we would have had to apply a coating to every sheet because of the handling that our work receives. We finish a lot of work that has been printed by Indigos and the quality from the iGen5 is comfortably on par with the Indigo.”
Blissetts’ own work includes thesis print and binding, yearbooks, wedding stationery and photobooks. These are pitched at the upper end of the market, working with photographers rather than directly to consumers. In short. it is not competing in the mass market. “That is so saturated and you can spend a lot of money on Adwords. Instead we focus at the more bespoke higher quality end where we play to our strengths. This includes wedding albums, where we can offer foiling, gold edges and section sewing and working with professional photographers,” he says.
This plays to the company’s deep experience and heritage as one of the country’s finest bookbinders, handling library restoration work alongside rather more prosaic jobs. These days the craft side is housed on the upper floor, the modern side including the iGen, Horizon four-clamp binder and three-knife trimmer are housed on the ground floor. It amounts to 700m2 of space. This is rather less than the 1,000m2 Blissetts used to have, but it is better laid out and more efficient. “That was very much an old school factory with low ceilings and pillars. The tour used to take a lot longer then than it does now. People always told us the old factory was a fascinating place to visit,” says Blissett.
The work is equally fascinating, covering both restoration and new work, promoting the skills required in book binding using traditional tools and techniques. Gary Blissett who stepped aside to enable Chris to take the reins last year, is consultant to this side of the business. The quality of the work has earned the company its third consecutive Royal Warrant.
The latest Xerox machine will continue this. Blissetts has chosen the four rather than five-colour version, with the option of an upgrade if needed at a later point. There is no call for the gamut extending colours, but opaque white could be appealing, says Blissett. A second hit can add to the impact he adds. However, this is not yet on the schedule. Instead the company is continuing to learn and understand the limits of the iGen5,
