We’re already seeing the significant benefits of investing in a Ricoh Pro C751 digital press, just three months after installing the machine at our Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire site. The new Ricoh machine with a fiery RIP has been installed as part of the latest step in a strategy that ensures we can offer both our UK and US customers a more on-demand, integrated & personalised print offering to support our fulfilment and postal operation.
Lee Bucktrout, Managing Director says “Like most brands and industries, our customers in the publishing and direct mail sectors need to get closer to their customers, make contact by engaging with them to increase brand loyalty and awareness, but achieve both of these within a more restrictive marketing budget.
“However, two great ways they can achieve this is by making the marketing around the product more personalised and targeted and secondly, ensure it is up to date. Consequently, last year we decided we could offer our customers an opportunity to help them to achieve this through us if we invested in robust digital printing technology that could offer high levels of data management, VDP and personalisation, all on demand.”
Our investment in the Ricoh Pro C751 is now enabling us to support customers with a more integrated, on-demand marketing-led print production service to augment its core business. And the decision to invest has already been more than validated in just a couple of months.
Lee continues “With the help of Ricoh, we undertook our first campaign for a customer as soon as we had the press installed. It was a large pre-Christmas marketing campaign on behalf of one of our publishing clients, which involved high levels of personalisation as well as up selling of other titles. The campaign was a real success, the client was happy and it gave us a clear business model for this new service that we can now roll out to other customers. Ricoh’s help was invaluable through this initial period. Since then, we have also secured another major contract with one of our US-based publishing customers, which involves personalised printing of the supporting marketing materials as well as one of their magazines itself here in the UK – the latter through one of our UK partners. Prior to this they were shipping the whole package – magazine and marketing materials from the US for us to simply distribute, so this is an outstanding result.”
“The customer is happy as the magazine has more lead time and is more up to date, production and logistics costs are down by around 20% and their readers are receiving a more relevant magazine with more targeted marketing materials around it. This is the perfect outcome for all parties and exactly what we were hoping for. With the Ricoh machine, we now have another great, proven business proposition to take to market. We see this side of the business being approximately 15 percent of our revenue stream in just three years’ time. It’s an ambitious target, but the results in the first three months speak for themselves.” Lee concludes.
Superior image quality and exceptional functionality gives the new Ricoh Pro™ C751 series the highest specification and reliability of any digital press in its class, raising the standard for productivity, efficiency, quality and profitability. It offers extremely high image quality VCSEL (Vertical Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser) technology for razor sharp 4800 dpi, chemical PxP™ toner and oil-less technology for accurate, smooth offset-like image quality. The Pro C751 has outstanding media versatility and an improved fusing unit and high productivity with substrates up to 300 gsm. The 751 has exceptional durability 180k maximum monthly volume, 75 ppm colour/mono and offers maximum uptime thanks to a new liquid cooling system that enables extended and continuous printing. The machine also has enhanced ORUs (Operator Replaceable Units) and toner bottles, waste toner and the ability to change media on the fly.
Gareth Parker, Strategic Marketing Manager, Ricoh UK, says “The fact the Pro C751 is already helping to give UKP Worldwide the freedom to operate their business in new ways is great news. To have secured such positive results and new contracts so soon after the installation is a real credit to their team. Since we first met in the summer of 2013, they have quickly grasped exactly how digital print can transform their proposition and open up new revenue streams and have applied this knowledge to their international model with great success. I’m sure the digital print package will continue to be a key component of their commercial direction over the next few years. It’s an exciting proposition for them and great for us to see Lee and his company thrive as their digital print partner.“
