Willow ramps up quality and speed with Xerox purchase

Willow Printing & Design has bought a Xerox Versant 80 to improve the quality of work and speed of throughput at the family business.

The seven-staff company in Newton le Willows, Merseyside, spent around £36,000 on the machine, which was delivered at the end of July and replaced a Heidelberg GTO.

“We were impressed with the speed and quality of the Xerox,” said owner Barry Kilshaw, who runs the business with his sister Cheryl.

The press runs at 80ppm with recommended throughputs of 25,000 to 80,000 pages per month and is intended for use with media including coated and uncoated paper, envelopes, and mixed-stock printing.

Willow Printing & Design has two other Heidelberg GTOs, two Xerox digital printers, Canon wide-format printers and an OKI digital printer.

Kilshaw's team produces conventional printed goods such as leaflets, pop-up banners and A1 posters, as well as t-shirts, mugs and aprons for clients in merchant services and home care sectors.

He said the new machine would complement the litho output from two-colour portrait or B3 landscape presses.

The company also has a range of finishing kit from guillotines, multi-towered collating machines for creating multi-set NCR books and pads, and inline digital stitching and hole punching.