Hollingworth & Moss bought a new Xerox J75 digital press and Fiery RIP, replacing a decade-old Xerox DocuColour 250 and Creo RIP, and its first PUR binder and has since won a contract worth up to £60,000 with Leeds City Council.
The Leeds-based family business is the sole supplier in a supply contract to rebind all the city’s library books, with an expected £15,000 annual spend.
Managing director Paul Hollingworth said: “We bind to academic standard, which will probably be better than the binding the books came with, we give them a new lease of life.”
The contract win came after the company installed its new Digibook 200 PUR binder, bought from Morgana Systems, in April, which will do the work.
Hollingworth said the company had seen a surge in orders following the investment: “We never would have got the work without the PUR and the Xerox. We were a hand binder but with this machine we can run it in manual mode, and it binds everything, of different sizes, it’s a great asset.
In manual mode the machine can be slowed down, allowing operatives to work on delicate books. It handles spine lengths from 110mm to 320 mm and a maximum thickness of 50mm.
“The J75 is quicker and it’s faster to rip the file. It’s increased capacity by 100%,” Hollingworth added.
“With the J75 and PUR binder we can now offer short-run PUR and bind, we’ve never offered the facility before. We bought the PUR to speed up rebinding library books but it can also do soft covers and there’s no other bindery in the Leeds area that can do that.”
The Xerox J75 makes it more economical for shorter runs, which are common in Hollingworth & Moss’s target markets of universities, public sector and academic and government libraries but Hollingworth said that his company was increasingly taking on short-run printing and binding for clients, including trade orders.
Around 20% of the company’s £1m annual sales comes through its web-to-print, such as its mythesis.co.uk service which prints and delivers academic theses by 10.30am the next day, and it is developing a number of white label web-to-print sites for other companies.
Currently the 26-staff company runs a 12-hour day shift but is thinking of doubling up.
"It’s a starting point for use. It’s the next level and we want to expand digital printing. We can do 25 soft back printed and bound, we can do one. We’re taking on three apprentices for first time in many years," said Hollingworth.
“Things have really picked up for us.”
