Digital Printers Extend DM Personalisation

Thamesdown Marketing Services, a Swindon (UK) direct mailing production facility, has expanded its capability by installing two Kodak Digimaster 9110 digital production systems.

Thamesdown Marketing Services, a Swindon (UK) direct mailing production facility, has expanded its capability by installing two Kodak Digimaster 9110 digital production systems.

With the addition of the Digimasters, Thamesdown has enhanced its capability for producing personalised prints using a variety of stocks, sizes and substrates.

Thamesdown's primary clients are agencies who outsource their print jobs.

Paul Parkin, the managing director at Thamesdown, has a strong background in marketing and direct mail strategies.

He sees personalisation and variable data services as the best way to promote continuing, robust growth for his 55-person company.

"Our main drive is personalisation and variable data.

We offer a data clean-up service," said Parkin.

Thamesdown typically receives print jobs from clients and then personalises them on the Digimaster 9110.

It also performs finishing services, which can include folding, slitting, perforating and gluing.

When Parkin researched a more cost-effective replacement for existing equipment, he quickly determined that the Digimaster 9110 offered the best technical capabilities available in the market today to meet his needs.

"We were looking to reduce costs but the real emphasis was quality and expanded capability.

The Digimaster can print at comparable speeds to most competitors but the key purchasing point is its quality features.

For example, the 9110 can print a variety of font sizes, right down to 0.6 with higher resolution, better graphic quality and on a wider variety of substrates.

These systems have so far delivered on all counts," explained Parkin.

He continued: "We believe that this investment will reduce costs in wastage and downtime in the long term.

This is the best machine on the market for specialisation and variable data printing." The 9110's flexibility to print on a variety of stocks, in a wide range of sizes, has increased Thamesdown's ability to offer greater levels of creativity and quality in its finished products.

The overall gains in image and text quality have also been remarkable.

Highly efficient for publication or transaction printing, the Digimaster handles image processing at 600 dots per inch (dpi) at 110 pages per minute added Parkin.

"The system gives us sharper text for smaller print, as well as sharper grey tones.

This is ideal for direct mail pieces," he commented.

The system's imaging and toning processes enable Thamesdown to produce high-impact materials with fine details, excellent halftones and richly dense solids he continued.

And Thamesdown's investment in two Digimaster 9110s had created the foundation for a larger growth strategy".

" "The key to digital is the use of different formats and the short runs.

At this point, we are 80 per cent web and 20 per cent sheet-fed and digital.

The volume jobs are run on the web and the specialist work is produced on the Digimaster.

This is a neat fit for our business strategy," Parkin explained.

He said he is banking on personalisation services to drive healthy expansion of the company.

"We have grown steadily since our inception seven years ago, at least 25 per cent each year.

Our growth formula is fairly straightforward and doesn't need to be complicated".

" We watch the market and watch the trends - today direct mail and personalisation is big," Parkin concluded.

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