The EFI Vutek’s are the workhorses of the Venture Banners production facility in Essex.

 

Trade superwide format printer Venture Banners is growing quickly through the application of its own and purchased hard and software.

When Scott Conway started what became Venture Banners from his bedroom in 2009, he did not envisage actually becoming a printer. He had been working as a marketing manager at Dutton Forshaw Motor Group (now Lookers), and buying print – particularly banners – was part of what he did.

The supply chain for large format banners, especially in small volumes, was problematic at the time, with service and pricing inconsistent. Mr Conway’s idea was to act as an aggregator – compiling small orders into larger volumes so that the production work could be outsourced economically to large format printers. The idea took off to the extent that both he and his colleague Wayne Bodimeade were able to leave Dutton Forshaw to pursue Venture Banners full time.

Working for the trade in this way, the business was growing, with greater and greater volumes able to be placed with major print suppliers at good prices. Venture had no intention of buying its own printing system however until a trip to Belgium with CMYUK towards the back end of 2011. ‘They put us in front of a 3.2 metre wide Vutek GS 3250 and we bought one on the spot,’ recalled Mr Conway, adding: ‘Then we bought another one a year after that.’

Two things had happened: the volume of work that Venture Banners was outsourcing was reaching that critical mass where the game and the associated numbers starts to change in favour of producing it yourself; and the EFI Vutek machines themselves left a deep impression.

‘Those two machines will do between 12,000 and 15,000 square metres of material per month – they are so fast, such amazing pieces of kit,’ he said.

Between March and September, the company is now producing between 600 and 1000 square metres of print per day at its Witham, Essex site. It deals only with trade customers and now has 5000 of them, who have access to wide format printing of banners and numerous other items without having needed to invest in an expensive piece of kit like a Vutek themselves. It does not matter how small the job is.

‘Some printers see a one metre square job as a pain, but we do tonnes of it,’ Mr Conway continued. ‘You can buy one square metre because it will be grouped in with other jobs and tiled up in prepress to minimise wastage. We do get big jobs like 1000 roller banners sometimes and we don’t shy away from them, but lots and lots of smaller jobs is our staple diet.’

This means that Venture Banners requires internal systems that can manage the flow of work, and the firm has designed its own software to do this. Mr Conway describes this system as ‘the corner stone of the business’, adding: ‘If we had to run around with job bags we would fall flat on our faces.’

The website is crucial to its success too. It includes menu pricing that puts an average mark up on each job quoted so that the customer can see what they could sell it for.  

Once jobs come through to production, there is a logical flow to the factory set up, to maximise efficiency beyond printing and into trimming, hemming, eyeletting and packing. Everything is geared up for volume. Much of the work is finished on a Zünd G3 XL-3200 digital cutting table. For Foamex, Venture prints onto self-adhesive vinyl and applies it to the board on a Rollsroller flatbed applicator. It believes it can produce them faster like this than most hybrids can print direct to the substrate, and also, said Mr Conway, the print finish is better. ‘You can’t even see it is SAV-applied,’ he added.

The Venture service looks to give customers everything they need to diversify into large format print without having to go through any of the aggravation involved in buying and installing a major piece of printing equipment. Every job is sent out under plain label, and 80% of it goes direct to the customers’ customer. Venture will not deal directly with end users. The trade service goes beyond print however: Venture will also supply unbranded spec sheets for products such as the Raptor banners that are proving so popular (Venture sells a thousand every five weeks, said Mr Conway), as well as help with other factors such as the customer’s website. ‘We class it as a business in a box,’ said Mr Conway.