Liverpool commercial printer The Printroom has bought lamination in-house with the purchase of a Foliant Taurus 530NG and a Foliant Multi-functional Inprinting unit from IFS.

Running both ManRoland litho and a Canon ImagePress 7011 toner-based digital press, The Printhouse was established in 2003 by a team who had worked together in the print facility of a financial organisation. The Printhouse produces high quality booklets and brochures for universities, colleges and schools as well promotional print for marketing agencies.

Managing director David Mann explained the reasons for the new investment: ‘We were sending out our lamination work to a very good local trade finisher but volumes were growing for fast turnaround short run work. We were getting a bottleneck so decided to bring the process in-house.

‘We did look at another system but the Foliant was most suited to the volumes we were going to be running. Now we can be much faster in turning our lamination work around. We have also been adding it to some jobs as an extra to test it out and this has resulted in customers coming back and asking for it again.

‘We liked its foiling capability too. This is something we are going to be offering more and more.’

The Inprinting unit is being used to add foiling and spot varnish for short run and personalised jobs for which producing a die would be too expensive. Mr Mann expects the unit to pay for itself in two years, but emphasised that the decision was more about providing a responsive service.