The celebrity and pop-character cut-out company hopes to grow its turnover from £2.6m to £10m within five years - and has invested heavily to back up its strategy.
A significant part of its investment - £30,000 - has been in a new AI market research tool that will help Star Cutouts predict trends in popularity, and get ahead of the competition.
Managing director Ian Ravey told Printweek: “It’s monitoring all media, so Twitter, Facebook - it can even look back into old news prints.
“It then produces a real-time report on what characters, what films, what celebrities people are talking about. That obviously then helps us to inform our design team to launch a product.”
The company has so far developed a stock of over 3,000 characters and people, including the Royal Family.
The bulk of Star Cutouts’ investment, however, has been in automating production - and it appears that it is unlikely to slow down soon.
The company installed a new Kongsberg C64 at the end of 2021, yet Ravey said that it was already looking to install a new shrinkwrapping line in the summer, and by the end of the year will look to buy another printing press.
The C64, bought directly from Kongsberg UK, now runs alongside Star Cutouts’ old Kongsberg XP44 at its 2,400sqm Ashton-under-Lyne site.
Ravey said that the extra capacity brought by the machine has helped the firm, which has 22 staff, practically double its capacity, without the need for any extra labour thanks to the table’s ability to run automatically from pallet to pallet.
“Nine times out of 10, it just runs through the pallet totally unattended. It’s fantastic.”
While the firm considered some other cutting tables, ultimately it was the ease of adoption that persuaded Ravey to go with the Kongsberg.
Since its launch in 2005, Star Cutouts has used Kongsberg cutting tables. The fact that both tables (the C64 and XP44) use the same file format, Ravey said, has meant that the production team can run any product through either machine, giving them real flexibility on the factory floor.
Star Cutouts’ growth strategy, according to Ravey, has been one of necessity.
With the ever-increasing costs of raw materials, he said, business has been challenging.
He said: “I think that’s why it’s important we keep investing in new production methods, new, quicker production techniques so that we can not absorb all the costs.
“That’s just not possible for anybody at the moment - but we are able to work, sensibly, on managing the level of increases that we’re passing on to our customers.”
Star Cutouts’ investment in the AI was made in collaboration with Made Smarter North West, a government-backed programme that helps businesses adopt next-generation tech in their manufacturing and processes.
