Tayprint, in Dundee, has been transformed over the last three years, thanks largely to a £1m investment in large-format HP print kit, and a recent shift to online ordering. James Miller, who was brought in to help the family company revamp what started life as a T-shirt printing business 40 years ago, explains the strategy.
James, Tayprint has completely overhauled its print kit and associated systems since 2018. Can you give us a broad-brush overview on your reasoning behind that?
Basically, in the near past we had kit that wasn’t very efficient, or environmentally friendly - a glaring problem to someone like me who’s worked in lots of other industries. We looked at a lot of kit and decided to go the HP latex route - it had all the elements we required.So the eco credentials of the HP latex kit made you plump for that. Were there other considerations too?
Well, it really was mostly about environmental considerations for the wider good - you could almost drink the ink from these machines - and for our employees too. Plus, we had a lot of waste from the old equipment - one machine was wasting about a third of the ink that we purchased for it.What HP machines are included in this latest investment then?
Two 1.6m 570’s, two Latex 3.2m-wide roll-to-roll 3600’s and and two R2000s.Just very recently Tayprint went live with a new Web-to-print system, opening up new routes to new potential customers. How do your HP printers fit into that strategy?
The interface between all the machines makes it quite easy to plug our other software into that.Even before the Covid-19 pandemic we’d made a decision to move towards an internet-based business model because we felt print was getting too cheap and more traditional businesses couldn’t make money from that!
We started work on the Web-to-print software before 2020 - it’s taken quite a long time - but it means the general public or other trade customers to link directly with us. If the jobs are print ready, they go directly to the HP machines.