Retail display and shopper marketing agency Impact Retail has upgraded its Onset X1 flatbed printer to the automated Onset X1 HS specification to increase production speeds and broaden the range of clients it can serve.
The Leicester-based company, which specialises in high quality retail displays for luxury brands, bought an Inca Onset X1 flatbed printer in March 2020 via Fujifilm to bring previously outsourced work in-house and so control production schedules more tightly.
‘Due to the nature of the brands we work with, the quality of our finished products is critical to everything we do,’ said Westley Allen, print manager at Impact Retail. ‘Reducing lead times is also very important, to ensure that we always support our clients to achieve challenging in-store launch dates.
‘Up until mid-2020, we had outsourced the vast majority of our print work, but we decided we wanted to have more control over quality and lead times and looked into options to bring it in-house. We ultimately felt that the first few machines we looked at lacked the set-up and print speed levels we needed, and once that became clear, the Onset was really the only option.’
The installation was delayed by the pandemic to July 2020 but rapidly vindicated the purchase decision and led to the decision to become a beta site for the Onset X1 HS (high speed) version, which as well as printing faster, uses robotic loading and unloading to speed overall production. Two months production testing was sufficient to convince Mr Allen and the investment in the X1 HS was finalised in December 2020, since when it has enabled significant changes to the business:
‘Combining the technology with a strategic change in working patterns, we have now doubled production capacity. This means we can now work with more clients, more brands and still provide the same exceptional service we pride ourselves on.
‘This investment also enables us to venture into more bespoke work, smaller volume production runs and projects that require faster turnaround times that may have been challenging to provide previously,’ he confirmed.
