Italian Pixart partners with UK’s Precision Printing
Venetian Web-to-print trade printer Pixart has partnered with Precision Printing in Barking, Essex to provide a UK-based service called pixartprinting.co.uk. The move is part of a wider rebranding which sees pixart.it become pixartprinting as the fast growing company moves out of what CEO Matteo Rigamonti refers to as a “trial mode with foreign markets” and aims to take more work from outside Italy.
Rigamonti said the strategy is based on overcoming the “Italianness” of the company which he thinks has held back growth in certain countries, especially the UK, where “there’s a trust issue with Italians”. In response pixartprinting is setting up dedicated websites for each nationality and native language customer care teams are being established, but the UK is the only country to get its own production capability.
Pixartprinting.co.uk, based at Precision Printing and run by 21 of its customer support personnel, will process all domestic orders routed via Pixart’s specially developed online workflow software. Printing will be undertaken on Precision’s kit though wide-format jobs will continue to be handled at the main pixartprinting Italian site in the immediate future. “We invested £4.5m in a Heidelberg B2 ten-colour press and an HP Indigo digital printer just a year ago so we have capacity there,” said Precision chief Gary Peeling. “We have much less wide-format capacity so initially that work will be handled in Italy, but wide-format is a large part of Pixart’s business and strategy so if we need to buy more kit in the UK then we may go that route – for now it’s suck it and see. We are effectively supporting Pixart in the UK as a subcontractor for now.”