Stylographics has bought one of the UK’s first SwissQPrint Kudu inkjet presses and will take delivery of what is the company’s flagship machine early next month.
The Watford company will replace a Canon Arizona with the more productive and more versatile machine. It has specified the press with neon pink and neon green as well as white, varnish and CMYKLMLC. This will give the company unprecedented flexibility says managing director Simon Wheeler.
“We have always been an innovator as a business,” he says. “Always looking for the next thing to give us an advantage.”
The company was among the first to install the pioneering inkjet printer the Zund UVjet 215 in 2001, following up with the first Massivit 3D printer in the UK a decade ago. The business has also won the Queen’s Award for Innovation, says Wheeler.
“We recognised that nobody else was printing neon and while the Arizona offered varnish and high build effects, it was just too slow to be productive.
“When we saw the machine in Switzerland I was blown away by what it could do. I decided then that we had to have it as the next machine to give us the edge on the next competitor.”
Samples, produced on the demo machine at SwissQPrint’s UK office in Bracknell, were shown off to creative agencies at a launch event in London last week. These included lenticular prints, raised effects, variable gloss as well as the neon colours both as standalone and combined with process inks to create punchier colours.
“Impact like this has not been possible with inkjet,” says Wheeler. “It’s like screenprinting again.”
The challenge is to persuade creatives that have no experience of these kinds of effects to unleash the power that the press can deliver. That may not be too hard. There were plenty looking closely at the samples, even stroking them on occasion.
“We wanted to get designers thinking how they might use these effects and to get the advantage of being early adopters of what this can do,” he explains.
The business works across retail, lifestyle and entertainment sectors including servicing film and television industries, producing accurate looking number plates for productions. What has taken several hours on the Arizona will be completed in less than an hour he adds.
“We are not about producing high volumes of print for retail, but will do print for 20-30 stores as a pilot to test a campaign before a full roll out. It’s very much that sort of prototyping and testing for brands to see how their ideas will work.”
The Massivit 1800 led to a big change for the company. It was not so much the capabilities of the machine itself, but that it attracted a lot of interest from companies that became customers for Stylo’s other services. But it was not without its own impact: Stylo has set up a paintshop because there was no alternative supplier to finish the larger than life models. “The paintshop has become one of our busiest departments and we have gained a lot of experience in 3D printing,” he says. Now it plans to gain as much experience of printing with neon colours.
And while the Arizona is being retired, Stylo is still doing business with Canon: a second Colorado is on its way to join the existing printer at the business.
