When graphic designer Rob Walker bought his first large-format inkjet printer in 2001 little did he think it be the catalyst for transformation and that little over a decade later his business would employ 40 and have a turnover of £3.5m.
Speed is of the essence at RJ Display. An Agfa MPress Leopard installed at the company’s Stanton-by-Dale site in Derbyshire last summer is key to managing director Rob Walker’s vision for continued growth at the operation he founded just down the road in 2000 as a one-man design studio. Then he had 93m2 (1,000sq ft) and was designing brochures for local companies. Now he manages a staff of 40 from a 1672m2 (18,000sq ft) factory, at the time of writing was on track for a £3.5m turnover for the year ending December 2012, and anticipates a turnover of £4.5m in 2013. 70% of that work is wide-format inkjet print, a ratio he expects to grow, largely due to the company’s positioning as a provider of low-cost but high quality and high volume print – something he can deliver thanks to the margins he can make from the high-speed MPress.
“That machine has put us in a different ballpark to the competition around here,” enthuses Walker. “When you’re talking a £700,000 investment it has to. There’s no doubt it will make a significant impact on the company and the work we undertake. The sheer volume we can put through that machine and still get really high quality output is amazing. It means that we can produce print at a really attractive price and still make sound margin.
“My own background is in design, and that’s how the company started out, so it may seem odd to some that our main focus is on what many see as the commoditised end of the wide-format market – producing high volumes of POP/POS etc. – but with the MPress we can really make that pay. That doesn’t mean we’re not doing more developmental stuff – we are – but that’s not our volume bread and butter work. We still make decent margin here or we wouldn’t be doing it. The thing is, to know when to turn a job down. In 2012 we turned down a £150,000 annual contract job because there was no margin in it. There’s no point filling a machine if it’s not making you money.”
A quick click on the RJ Display website brings up a list of wide-format kit that proves Walker is not shy of investment where he can see it paying off. And that all began with a 36in wide HP2500 he bought in 2001 as a proofing device for what was then still a design practice.
“Once clients knew we had that device they started asking if we could do the odd poster. Design was still the focus at that point and I took on another designer but print became an increasingly large part of what we supplied, providing our design customers with print as an add-on really. Before we knew it they were asking for pop-up graphics, exhibition work etc. as well as brochures and other small-format work. Some we farmed out, the litho work mainly, and some we did in-house. But we could see that with wide-format we really had a growth opportunity and in 2008 we moved to a bigger site specifically so we could grow our large-format work. At that point we had grown to 12 staff, which was a mix of design and print production people. And we started to buy an array of wide-format printing and finishing equipment,” explains Walker.
“Within a year of the move we doubled turnover from £1.4m and we’ve progressively expanded the kit we own and the staff base. In March 2012 we bought the unit next door to the site we’ve occupied since 2008. That gave us another 557m2 so we had room to get the MPress.
“Because of the volumes we can put through that we can do much more work for brokers and for the trade in general. About 35% of our turnover is currently trade work but we expect that to grow. That doesn’t mean we can’t be creative. Although we do volume work it’s not the type of work that commands no margin. Our focus is on anything that requires really good quality. I think we’re at the point were wide-format can compete on quality with litho and we’ve shown agencies output from the MPresss, at a speed that’s perhaps twice as fast as some other machines, and the quality is still twice as good. That’s the key; until there are lots of MPresses out there and the market wakes up to what is achievable and starts demanding print costs be cut accordingly, we can make money.
“At the moment the workload is mainly for the POP/POS market. An ideal client is one that perhaps has 100 outlets that need fast turnaround, high quality visual communications. We could run our machines to do higher margin niche applications, but that means lower volume and finding the customers for that print – you have to know who they are and how to get to them. We don’t shun that concept – we spend a lot of time looking at new materials and work closely with three substrates developers that make materials for us – usually application specific. Damon Piall, our commercial director, has a background in sourcing new products so he heads up project development. We’ve done things like make bespoke decals for kids’ scooters and that kind of thing but at this moment in time that’s not the mainstay of our business.”
From a strategic point of view Walker is aware that RJ Display needs effective systems in place if it’s to continue to move forward at the kind of pace it has become accustomed to. For instance, it should be just about completing ISO 19001 and 14001 by the time you read this. “As soon as you start doing any kind of volume for brands they want to see accreditations,” says Walker. “You can have all the kit in the world, but you’re going to hit a wall unless you have those marks.”
The company has also spent over £150,000 developing a Web-to-print system – currently being used by a small number of specific customers but with the potential for further roll-out. And the company’s MIS system is about to be changed to a system that better encompasses wide-format production.
“We’ve come a long way in terms of wide-format since we began producing a few posters,” says Walker. “And we think there’s still a long way to go.”