Special colours, quality and productivity all cited as factors behind UK specialist printer’s investment decision in December 2023
A small company in terms of size, Leicestershire-based EA Printing works with a huge number of major UK and global brands, both directly and through creative agencies. Offering a wide range of services, from digital print, to wide format, letterpress, die cutting, embossing and debossing, EA Printing specialises in complex, conceptual work that its customers find hard to get done elsewhere.
Needing to replace an end-of-life toner device, the very hands-on business owners Matt Saulsbury and David Kennedy considered a range of options, before opting for the Revoria Press PC1120.
Saulsbury comments: “We’d never dealt with Fujifilm before, because until recently they haven’t been directly involved in the toner market in the UK. Though of course, as everyone knows, Fujifilm-made digital toner presses have been around for a long time, and we’d been using one ourselves for a number of years. I’d always been very impressed with the technology, so when I started seeing a few articles in the trade press about Fujifilm entering the toner market directly in the UK, I was interested. I know the quality of their products and I liked the idea of working with them directly.
“Ultimately it was a visit from a Fujifilm wide format sales rep that really got the ball rolling. He came to talk to us about wide format, but we quickly got talking about Revoria, and it all went from there.
“We did consider a few other options, including sticking with our existing supplier, but ultimately we decided that we needed to take the opportunity to invest in something that was going to help us differentiate our offering and grow our business, rather than just stand still and keep doing what we had been doing. When we’d decided that, the choice was obvious.”
EA Printing’s Revoria Press PC1120 was installed in late December 2023 and was put straight to work from early January. “It was incredibly busy right away,” Saulsbury continues. “Even before we were fully trained up on how to use it, we had jobs coming in. We really liked the fact that it had a white ink option, with all the requests we get now for printing on dark or coloured board. We’d also immediately seen the potential for the gold and silver ink options to win us high value work with metallic effects. But, somewhat to our surprise, the biggest advantage so far has been the pink ink – which has already won us some greeting cards work. The creative agency sourcing the greetings cards needed a print supplier who could produce fluorescent colours, and the florescent pink we can achieve on the PC1120 was exactly right for what they needed.
“The other advantage of the pink, from a much more practical point of view, is that we can now match far more pantone colours than we could before. We’re always getting customers bringing slightly unusual colours to us and asking if we can match them. With the pink, we can do that far more now than we could before.”
With so much more the company can now offer, EA Printing is planning some open days for creative agencies to come and see the creative potential of the special colours and effects now on offer.
Aside from the special colours, Saulsbury also notes the improved productivity and quality they’re noticing compared with their previous press.
“The quality has surprised me.” Saulsbury confesses. “I knew it was a step up from what we had before – but hadn’t expected that step up to be as big as it has. We’ve really noticed it and we’ve had customers remark on it as well.
“It’s also a lot faster than what we had before, which is particularly noticeable when we’re crunching through longer run print jobs. Then there’s the long sheet format option, which we can also duplex print from a high capacity tray. Taken altogether, it all adds up to a massive productivity boost.”
In a challenging market, Saulsbury is confident about his own company’s prospects and sees his new investment and partnership with Fujifilm as positive steps in facing that future.
“Our business is going really well,” he says. “But it’s obviously tough out there and you can never get complacent. I’ve seen a lot of print businesses our sort of size, as well as a lot of larger ones go out of business recently. You have to look to the future, look at what you can do better, what you can do differently. You have to take risks. Investing in the Revoria PC1120 was a huge outlay for a small business like us. But it’s allowed us to massively increase the scope of our offering to customers and, in Fujifilm, we now have the support of a tight-knit, knowledgeable and highly professional team to help us get the very best out of it.”
Andy Kent, Divisional Manager, Fujifilm Graphic Communications, UK adds: “We’re delighted to be working with EA Printing – they’re a small business with huge ambitions, and we’re proud to be supporting them in growing their service offering and their business.”
To find out more about the Revoria Press PC1120:
