Imaging Centre has had a peripatetic existence, moving from a shed in Tonbridge to a small factory in nearby Pembury, then to a larger factory in East Peckham and now to Marden. Operations director Jessica Short agrees: “We seem to outgrow our premises every five years and have to find more space.” Those days are at an end. The company has 1,400m2 of a recently constructed building which is enough to house three HP Indigos, paper and board and enough finishing capacity to cope with a steady flow of greetings cards as well as the fulfilment area needed to pack and dispatch these each day. There is an optimised workflow through the production steps. The Imaging Centre is unlikely to find a better spot. Then there is the hassle that comes with any uprooting. “We are not going through that sort of move again,” she states.
The company though is ambitious. Short is already thinking about installing a second and perhaps third floor in the void above the production floor for offices and support staff, also perhaps for fulfilment which could be connected to dispatch via helter skelter style chutes, she laughs. “People come in and look at what they think is wasted space that could be used for storage. But that wasted space is the future for us. We don’t want storage. We want to move things through. I want us to be the Amazon of greetings cards.”
It is not out of the question. Increasingly publishers are thinking differently about how they buy greetings cards and where these come from. Long supply chains and big orders held in stock are out of favour. Price may no longer be the most important factor.
The business has grown steadily since being founded by her father Rob Short, a former Kodak salesman, and mother Janice, as a general commercial printer in 1998. It started printing cards for a local publisher and then took on the business of ABC Cards when the client could not pay his bills. At a stroke the Imaging Centre became a specialist in digitally printed greetings cards. At the time she says her father could not understand the conventional business model, printing thousands of each design and hoping that they would sell. It certainly did not help ABC. Short argued that it would make more sense to print in smaller batches and avoid the cash risk tied up in unnecessary stock, particularly for smaller card designers and publishers.
It has worked. The Imaging Centre has more than 600 card publishers on its books most managing their own accounts through Simplicity, a web portal that the business has developed to cut down on admin for both publisher and printer as orders have increased. It can now expect to receive up to 100 different orders a day, each representing a clutch of designs in different quantities – six of these, 50 of that, perhaps 500 of this card. Each order will be with the customer less than a week later. The dream is to cut this turnaround time.
The founders of the business retired at the end of 2019 leaving daughter Jessica and son Adam as directors to run the business. Adam is managing director by title and is out developing the client side of the business while his sister runs the operational side. In the last couple of years, even without a major move, this has been challenging. “We went into lockdown in March 2020 with plans for new premises and a new press. Then Covid happened,” she says.
It did not stop the business. Greetings cards were in demand as a physical counterpoint to online meetings of all kinds. And the mountain of cards received by Captain Tom in support of his efforts to raise money for the NHS, cemented the UK’s position as a card sending country still further. The public wanted to use greetings cards even if conventional shops could not trade at this time. The Imaging Centre seemed to take this its stride, continuing to deliver and continuing with its plans to move to a new factory at the end of 2021. Everything it had had in East Peckham, 20 minutes down the road, was moved in three days without suffering too much damage. Its first B2 Indigo, a 12000 with Value Pack was awaiting in the new premises. The business has always been an Indigo house and now operates a 7800 and 7900 as well as the B2 press. It has also been a long standing customer for Duplo. One of its Duplo multifinishers gained an unexpected dent during the move.
The newest Indigo was needed to cope with the longer runs that some high street groups require and that the business wanted to keep servicing. In turn this has had an impact on finishing and fulfilment for the business with a spate of investment to keep pace. That has led this year to the company becoming the first in the UK with Duplo’s DC20K, Duplo’s way of expanding its multifinishers to cope with the B2 sheet format. It has also invested in a Bagel foiling laminator and a new hot foiling machine, both faster than the alternatives it had been using.
Short explains: “The investments mean we can retain our relationship with customers as they grow for much longer than before. Three-quarters of our customers started out just by drawing and being creative with cards at home without much idea of how to publish them. Now we can grow them from an order for 120 cards sold to an independent shop to tens of thousands of a design for a high street chain. We have that flexibility and we can prolong the service we provide to them.”
The Indigos are configured to deliver that flexibility. The B2 machine is all about volume, printing at least twice as many cards to the sheet as the standard machines. For a 120x170mm card, however, the extra space that the 12000 allows means that what is printed two-up on an SRA3 sheet is eight-up on the larger press.
As a result the Imaging Centre can come closer to litho on unit price and can more than match litho on turnaround times. The B2 press produces four-colour work; the Indigo 7800 will print white and silver in addition to CMYK; the Indigo 7900 offers neon pink and yellow.
It covers the majority of what a publisher might want in terms of print. The digital foiling units immediately after the presses make it easy to return the silver foiled card to the Indigos to produce a range of metallic colours. It is simply the most efficient position for them Short points out. The operations director is constantly looking for marginal efficiency improvements. “The criteria for any investment we make is ‘Will it make us more efficient, will it improve turnaround time and will it improve service for customers?’,” she says.
The Imaging Centre wants to be as frictionless and convenient as possible for customers. This is where the Simplicity web portal fits in, changing a physical warehouse storing already printed cards into a digital warehouse for print on demand. There is no cash tied up in stock which may never be sold. Simplicity is well named: it is simple for the publisher to log on and add a new design, and simple for the publisher to place an order with a delivery provider direct to the retailer, whether an independent card shop or chain of some kind.
“Publishers need only print what they have already sold,” she says. It means that the Imaging Centre can even look forward to a recession as its approach cuts risks and helps publishers manage cash more effectively than before. The technology does not replace human contact. Each publisher is assigned an account manager to look after the relationship. “We are very conscious that we do not lose that personal touch as we grow,” she adds.
Behind the user interface and functionality of the portal is a Pace MIS which handles the flow of the print ready artwork to the presses, identifying the job for whatever finishing processes are needed and keeping tabs on delivery destination. Immediately after the presses the company has two laminating foiling machines, one a Vivid Matrix which has served until the arrival of the larger press. The sheer volume of work made digital foiling into a bottleneck now eased with installation of the Bagel which runs up to three times faster than its neighbour.
Then comes a little used UV flood coater and an equally lazy guillotine. It is no longer needed to cut larger sheets down to the size for the multifinishers. There are three of these, two DC746 configurations, one a DC745. And now the new DC20K. The Imaging Centre was picked as the ideal beta site for this and it proved to be the right choice for the supplier. The printer has since become the first in the world to purchase the machine outright.
Prior to its arrival, the B2 sheets would need to be cut to size before reaching one of the standard format multifinishers, tying up an operator and causing a bottleneck in cutting, slitting and creasing as volumes increased.
Likewise it has installed an NSF Elite to keep pace with growing demand for hot foil stamping. “It is three times faster,” she says, “and another way to support longer runs.” A Renz wire binder and Duplo booklet maker are largely legacy of the time before greetings cards dominated the work mix. The company is not entirely about cards – it has used the larger sheet size of the Indigo 12000 to begin producing sheets of gift wrap for publishers for example – but there is little jobbing print left.
There has also been investment in the fulfilment side, adding to the regiment of outworkers who marry cards and envelopes at home as well as with some of the related products that retailers might need for the publishers. “It’s about investing to make sure that we can do turnaround times efficiently,” says Short. “We want to be able to go back to companies that have left us to go to litho and show what we can now do to handle the volumes they have.
Sustainability and the environment are an increasingly important factor for the business. Any investment needs to be measured against this criterion. To date, says Short, card publishers remain ambivalent about film wrap, some like the degree of protection it offers, others are against plastic in any way. The Imaging Centre prefers to send out cards boxed with no other protection, but can offer biodegradable as well as standard films. It has FSC certification and points to the inherent benefits of an on demand print model – no wastage, no unnecessary spend and no wasted time.
This applies to how it has worked to keep stock levels to a manageable level, Short explains. However, a year ago this strategy almost blew up for the business. It had been used to ordering paper for next day delivery, allowing it to keep stocks to an absolute minimum. The company called to place a new order for 240,000 sheets of Invercote, its preferred board, only to be told that none would be available until February. It was a shock to the system and the company changed tack. It went from a position of holding say £20,000 in envelopes, paper and board at any one time to four times that amount in order to guarantee continuity of supply to publishers.
It now orders on a three-month rolling principle. If the material is not used immediately it is not necessarily coated in preparation for the Indigos until actually needed, but the material will be there. A similar arrangement applies to envelopes from Enveco, its supplier. Currently stock management for the company is a manual process, though automation is coming. Stock tracking and management will be the next Pace MIS module to be implemented.
Around the factory, offices and meeting areas there are recycling bins an indication that the company takes sustainability seriously. Many of its customers require this and one of them promises to plant a tree for every card sold. In addition, the building has EV charging points and the Image Centre’s company cars are powered in this way. All waste is recycled and pallets are repaired and reused by another local business. Any plastics that come into the factory are likely to be reused as protective packing.
This is part of the message that comes up in In Press seminars that the Imaging Centre organises for its customers to talk them through the production process from its online ordering through to packing. “The seminars are for publishers that are new to the industry. We can show them the production side and how they can start small and grow to be big, how we can grow together and how to be cost effective in production,” Short says.
Materials partners have joined the presentations while participants take away a batch of cards that they have loaded into the Simplicity system and followed through the process.
The online ordering technology is being extended to a version for retailers, allowing individual shops to collect orders for a number of publishers into one combined order. The publishers make a limited choice of their most popular designs available in this way. It is more convenient for the shop and has an environmental benefit in reducing the number of drops to that address.
There are no plans to sit back. Apart from thoughts about the additional floors that might be added, Short wants to take on and match turnaround times offered by fulfilment led businesses.
She says: “We are aiming to get to next day delivery if we can – currently it’s four to six days. We don’t know how and we don’t know when, but we will get there.”
