Installed over the summer, the 120 A4ppm, seven colour digital press replaced the multi award-winning firm’s 12-year-old Indigo 5500.
Managing director Fenton Smith said that despite the Covid challenges, he decided to press on with the installation as the business case for investing remained, namely migrating more short-run litho work to its digital press and maintain healthier margins.
“We haven’t used it anywhere near as much as I intended to, because we haven’t been that busy, but the work that we have put through it has come out much, much better than the old machine would have produced.”
Smith said that as the factory had been quieter than it ordinarily would have been, the team had used the opportunity to put the “pretty much fully loaded” 7900, which was revamped earlier this year to handle a wider range of substrates, through its paces.
“It does some really clever stuff and the silver’s really good and the white is fantastic and the varnishing is clever too,” he said.
“The creative bits are going to be quite useful to us, so we wanted to have a proper play with it.”
Smith added that one of the other benefits of migrating some of the firm’s litho work to the new Indigo was that it would free up its six-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 74 press to focus on more of its, high-end, award-winning books.
One recent project it completed was i.Detroit by UK multimedia artist and photographer Marcus Lyon.
The £200 tome, which Smith said weighed more than 5kgs, features getting on for 500 pages and includes photographs of 100 Detroit residents along with their personal stories and mapped DNA.
The book, which was officially launched last week, was completed over lockdown and took around six weeks to produce.
— Marcus Lyon (@lyon_marcus) October 13, 2020
“It’s the most amazing thing that we have produced, I think. It’s off the scale,” said Smith.
While a handful of the firm’s 11 staff remain on furlough, they will be coming back when the Job Retention Scheme ends in a couple of weeks.
Smith said that even before lockdown the business had been “so lean it was ridiculous” and his strategy through lockdown was to hold his nerve and retain the firm’s skillsets so that it was best positioned for the recovery.
