Promotional gifts printer Proper Goose has installed a Duplo DuSense in a double investment with a five-colour Ricoh 7200 equipped to print neon pink.
The West Molesey company believes the combination will add a layer of enhancement and impact to the company’s personalised and promotional products and creates a difference from other printers, says director Luke Gosling.
“We produce a lot of playing cards that use bright colours,” he says. “With a spot UV varnish on top we will really enhance the range of bright colours we can print.”
It is still early days. Training has just finished on the Ricoh and is starting on the DuSense. The company is looking forward to the impact that it can have, not just for customers buying through the company’s website, but also as a trade service for digital printers with limited volumes of print enhancement.
“It will give us a lot of possibilities. It’s a piece of kit that others will not have,” says Gosling. “Some printers will have the neon capability, some the spot UV varnish. Very few will have both.
“We see possibilities in connecting it with personalisation along with Trotec lesser cutting and foiling for the gifting products that we aim for.”
As well as playing cards there are tins filled with confectionery, greetings cards, notebooks and stationery. The rigid metal and wooden products are printed on a Mimaki UV inkjet press.
This was the foundation for the business when Mark Gosling, Luke’s father, had set up the company to print short run notebooks on behalf of designers. “We wanted to do short runs for artists,” says Gosling. “But artists are very particular about what they want. And they don’t have money to buy the 1,000 books. They would need to get the unit costs to where they want it and can’t afford the price for short runs of 50-100 at a time.”
That led the company into the personalisation side, culminating in investment in the Ricoh and DuSense. The new digital press replaces an older Xerox Versant which was capable only of four-colour printing. He adds: “We had looked at a like for like replacement, but thought why not add another element to what we could do.”
The company also has a Duplo DC646 multifinisher for greetings cards and playing cards, though cannot cope with rounded corners. For these Proper Goose uses a PFI DiCut 300 cutting table which will be replaced with the upcoming DiCut 310 when this reaches the UK.
“We know it is already available in the US and are waiting for it to come to the UK,” Gosling says. “This will be the latest version that will be coming to us in the next couple of weeks.”
It is also looking at adding further automation to its storefront, investigating what Custom Gateway can offer.
