23 Nov Vinyl by Design invest in a complete sign & graphic solution

With the help of Digital Office, leading graphic & signage company Vinyl by Design are achieving consistent colour output and boosting profitability by nearly 40%

Vinyl by Design is a family run company, based in Coventry, supplying sign writing and printing throughout the Midlands. They work extensively with the automotive industry and specialise in high quality, professional sign writing for cars, vans, lorries and other fleet vehicles. The company provide signage solutions from small point of sale signs to large format banners.

Vehicle graphics and wraps are the main core business, from the initial design to the manufacture and installation of high quality graphics on to small cars to heavy goods lorries. Vinyl By Design are able to offer complete colour change to any vehicle without any damage to the original paintwork.

The Challenges

Managing Director, Mark Holt, explained before the investment,  the business solely focused on cutting and installing vinyl signage with all print and production outsourced to a 3rd party. However, as the business grew, and customer demands changed, the need for bringing print in house offered a more productive and cost effective solution.

Outsourcing became challenging when more customers started demanding faster lead times. Print schedules are based not only on the availability of the equipment, but also the size, demand and profitability of other customers placing orders.  After becoming a chosen supplier of vehicle graphics and showroom signage for some of the UK’s leading car dealerships including Sytner and Listers, frequency of unexpected changes in vehicle graphics made it increasingly difficult to be flexible in making last minute design changes and guaranteeing lead times.

Outsourcing all vinyl printing heavily impacted overall profitability of the business and added more complexity when appropriately pricing client work. It was often the case that work where clients require fast lead times; the 3rd party printer could charge a premium for prioritising that job over others.

The Solution

Built for speed, reliability and flexibility, Caldera GrandRIP+ is at the cutting-edge of wide-format production software. Vinyl by Design has just integrated a Caldera GrandRIP+ Print-to-Cut system into their business. The software runs on multiple PC / Mac platforms, and drives printing and cutting devices. Vehicle wrapping is an expanding market with a requirement for high precision vinyl printing and cutting with an ever-growing range of finishes. The Caldera print-to-cut range provides Vinyl by Design a modular and scalable workflow management, powerful colour control, optimized tiling and nesting, and excellent cost control. Caldera GrandRIP+ is a powerful, efficient, fast and feature-rich print and cut RIP system, designed to enhance productivity and quality, offering quick and efficient visual job manipulation, automatic printing of cutter-specific registration marks and creation of cut files, step-and-repeat, tiling and poster making.

The Caldera installation at Vinyl by Design is a perfect example of a complete sign & graphic facility, driven from a consolidated, unified RIP system. Vinyl by Design have been able to take full advantage of Caldera’s features, designed to provide production load balancing, redundancy of computer hardware and protection against a single point of failure. Never again will a loss of a RIP computer result in an expensive printing machine standing still!”. Caldera GrandRIP+ is a powerful, efficient, fast and feature-rich print and cut RIP system, designed to enhance productivity and quality, offering quick and efficient visual job manipulation, automatic printing of cutter-specific registration marks and creation of cut files, step-and-repeat, tiling and poster making.

John Rounsley, Operations Director at Vinyl by Design says, “This solution offers us a range of features, from ink-saving to cost management tools. It makes light work of managing our jobs, organizing all cutting and finishing, and giving us complete cost visibility – all from one PC .”

Designed for a wide variety of indoor and outdoor prints, the ValueJet VJ-1624X delivers excellent print quality including long-term outdoor posters, billboards, building announcements, signs and banners, backlit signage, POS displays, vehicle graphics, and fine art reproduction.

The Mutoh ValueJet VJ-1624X is able to deliver excellent print quality for short print runs as well as higher volume production runs. With speeds of up to 20.5m2/h, this printer was a perfect match for Vinyl by Design. The VJ-1624X delivers best-in-class speed and the highest levels of quality with Mutoh’s award-winning Intelligent Interweaving & DropMaster print technology, which offers predictable and repeatable output quality fit for purpose every time in the shortest possible time, drastically reducing or eliminating horizontal banding, step mismatch banding and the visible effects of missing or misfiring nozzles. The overall performance of the Mutoh has proved instrumental in driving more productivity, profitability and peace of mind. John stated, “one major factor was profitability and turn around. Larger jobs can now be completed in half the time, increasing the company’s uptime and putting us under less pressure”. To add even more value, we upgraded the standard ink cartridges to Mutoh‘s Ultra Value range – offering CMYK in 1000ml ink bag and lowering the cost per ml of ink.

The existing cutter was replaced with a SummaCut D140FX Series vinyl cutter. Using SummaSign Pro technology, the SummaCut offers unrivalled accuracy, speed and features not found in other affordably priced cutters.

The Kala Starter was perfect complement to both the Mutoh and Summa. This laminator is designed for ease of use and versatility. The pressure can be adjusted with a high level of control and visual gauge, unlike many other laminators at this price level, which often only have a pre-set lever to control pressure.  The top and bottom rollers are crowned for ease of use and superior quality lamination. The Kala starter can simultaneously apply lamination film to one side and an adhesive layer to the other for easy finishing onto a broad range of substrates up to 50mm thick.