Kingswood Steele reaps benefits of Duplo multi-buy

Kingswood Steele has purchased a DB-280 perfect binder, DPB-500 perfect binder and Challenge CMT-130 book trimmer from Duplo to improve its speed and efficiency.

The Moorgate, London-based digital printer installed the kit, which cost around £90,000 in total, at its 743sqm premises around six months ago. The two perfect binders replaced a Duplo DB-200, which the firm has sold on.

“We are a 24/7 operation and can offer out-of-hours service to the trade at short notice. We’ve always had smaller perfect binders but the volume of work we’ve done in that market has increased rapidly,” said managing director Robert Long.

“This investment has transformed what we do and we can now produce anything up to 500 perfect-bound books per hour.”

The company also runs Duplo bookletmakers, folders, stitchers, creasers and laminators as well as kit from Xerox, Océ and Watkiss and large-format Roland and HP machines. 

“We looked at all sorts of different perfect binders from Watkiss, Morgana and others when researching the market, but the Duplo machines were the best that we saw which suited our requirements. They’ve bought pure speed and reliability to our binding operation,” said Long.

“The additional investment in the three-edge trimmer has given us the ability to bind and trim within minutes of each other, with one person able to do the whole process. It’s given us a much higher quality finish, it’s speedier and there’s less resource involved.”

The firm has 40 staff and is anticipating a turnover of £3.5m this year, having trebled its turnover in the past 18 months. It serves B2B customers in the legal, financial and commercial markets.