UK retail and shopper marketing agency Impact Retail has upgraded its Onset X1 printer to the higher-speed, automated Onset X1 HS in a world first.
The Leicester-based company - which installed Fujifilm’s Onset X1 in July 2020 - has been a Beta site for the HS version for some time, and following months of successful testing, has become the first company to invest in the model.
“This is by far the biggest cap-ex we’ve ever undertaken as a business - it was not a decision we took lightly, but the speed and quality were of such a high standard that we were confident it was a good strategic long-term investment,” said Westley Allen, print manager at Impact Retail.
Covid-19 delayed the installation of the Onset X1, which was initially planned for March 2020 but not completed until the summer. By October 2020 the company had agreed to be a test site for the automated Onset X1 HS. “Given how well things had gone, we were very much open to incorporating robotics onto the X1 to boost speeds still further,” said Allen. “It already ran fast, but we felt that if we could produce the same quality print even faster, we were looking at a game-changer. The automatic unloading of substrates greatly reduces set up times and the versatility in terms of media the robotics can handle is very impressive.”
Impact Retail’s full investment in the Onset X1 HS was finalised in December 2020. Allen said of the move: “Combining the technology with a strategic change in working patterns, we have now doubled production capacity. This investment also enables us to venture into more bespoke work, smaller volume production runs and projects that require faster turnaround times that may have been challenging to provide previously.
“Initially, we were printing to display and fluted boards for the temporary display side of the business. We’re now broadening the range of substrates and applications, allowing us to print even more of our premium retail display work in-house.
“Investing in the Onset X1 HS is the single biggest investment this company has ever made and we can safely say it has transformed our business. We had originally envisaged the Onset taking on around 80% of the digital print jobs we were outsourcing - with the remaining 20% and all our litho work continuing to be outsourced. But it has exceeded our expectations massively. We have, in fact, now brought all of our digital print and litho work in-house - with the exception of a few speciality print jobs - and we’re printing more than double the volume we’d anticipated. When business gets back up to pre-pandemic levels we’ll do even more.”