Harrier LLC has some serious print and finishing power at hand for its growing trade business, but insists that building relationships is its most important consideration.
Eight HP Indigo presses and a state-of-the-art Kolbus case binding line adds up to a serious amount of firepower, and Devon-based Harrier LLC has enough of that firepower spare to offer a trade printing service that is already worth £4 million per year to the business, with capacity to grow further.
Much of Harrier’s core work is for the photo and photo-gift sector and is therefore quite seasonal. Even at peak times for the photo business however, there is spare capacity. Harrier has to be able to handle more than the volumes that could come in on its biggest, busiest day. It means that when that day comes around, there is still an HP Indigo press standing spare at the production site in Newton Abbott.
‘People generally use us because we have HP Indigo equipment, we are very competitive, we offer quick turnaround and because we are nice people, and that’s a serious point,’ said Harrier’s Julian Marsh. ‘We have got a large customer service team who are totally committed to delivering customer satisfaction, and working with trade buyers is about relationships. We want mutually beneficial relationships and when things go wrong, it’s about dealing with it and putting things right. We are very much interested in making long term relationships.’
The trade service is proving to be attractive to many types of customer. There are the fellow printers that are looking to move into digital print and use Harrier to grow that side of the business without having to make a substantial up-front investment. There are printers that have no intention of entering the digital space that send suitable jobs to Harrier. There are also printers that use Harrier’s capacity for disaster recovery and overflow work, when their own kit or operators are out of action and jobs need to be fulfilled.
Sometimes a trade customer is most interested in the specialist finishing capability, rather than Indigo print. While there is good, low cost case binding equipment on the market, its hourly output rates may not be sufficient for a big job, while the Kolbus line can produce 2000 books per hour.
There is a wide range of facilities management and print management firms that Harrier produces work for, as well as designers and agencies, and a growing sector of online businesses that offer products and services to consumers, for whom Harrier handles the print fulfilment, allowing them to concentrate on their route to market, their software offering, marketing and customer service. ‘They are not the traditional trade buyer but they know exactly what they want from a supplier and the SLAs they expect, and they are quite specific about how they choose their trade partners,’ said Mr Marsh.
Trade buyers may be concerned about their work being neglected during the peak photo periods, but Mr Marsh assures that this does not happen, saying: ‘There is generally a two to four day turnaround with photo customers, and we’ve been very successful in our ability to juggle the trade workflows with that.’
There is no particular type of work that Harrier is looking to take on. It has the capacity to handle massive one-off jobs through its HP Indigos and the Kolbus line, which can produce 50,000 case-bound books a day. Soft cover books are handled by four Horizon and Morgana PUR binders, and there are Duplo booklet-makers too. At the other end of the scale, Harrier can handle large quantities of very small orders too, with a highly sophisticated IT set up that is capable of handling almost 100,000 orders per day during the peak photo periods. Customers can get instant pricing and jobs enter directly into the company’s automated workflow. Harrier is also highly experienced and accomplished with variable data processing and printing, with one catalogue job involving several hundred thousand assets where every page is unique, all produced on multiple presses on the fly.
The central point to Harrier’s trade printing and finishing service is that it gives its customers access to an infrastructure that would cost them millions in capital expenditure to put in themselves. The company is proud of its achievements in delivering jobs within the agreed schedules and will always sort any issues that may occur. To build those sought-after long term relationships, the emphasis is on Harrier to ‘get it right’, said Mr Marsh, but this acceptance is underpinned by confidence: ‘This is the trade model – just done better, faster and more cost effectively.’
