When Riki Witehira bought the Rosstrevor Street business on the fringe of Hamilton’s central business district last year, he’d used the copy shop himself as a designer.
Now the former product design engineer is upgrading its equipment as it branches out into digital printing to complement the shop’s traditional offering to its corporate and local business clients.
“I actually knew the previous owner and that’s how we bought it. It has been one of Hamilton’s longest established copy shop businesses, having traded for more than 25 years,” Riki says.
He initially bought a manual digital creaser and guillotine when he bought the business, now he has added a fully automated Morgana Major Folder and Autocreaser through CPI.
He says both machines have hugely increased the company’s production output, making it very competitive in terms of its turnaround times. It has also brought valuable work they’d previously out-sourced back in-house.
“It enables me now to come into work in the evenings or on weekends if necessary and finish urgent jobs for people. That’s something I couldn’t have done before.”
He cites an example of a job that came in three days before Christmas which was finished and sent back to the customer within 24 hours.
“This is also something we couldn’t have done previously because of out-sourcing. It was 10,000 A4’s which had to be creased and folded into A5’s.”
Another job the machine handled quickly and efficiently was a black and white run of 5000 pamphlets that had to be printed, creased and folded to DLE. They came in by email at 2pm and were back on a courier at 4pm.
Riki says they did do some research into the best brand of folder to buy and the Morgana satisfied all their requirements. It takes up to 240gsm card, crucial to their operation when most jobs are 160gsm or above. Anything over that can be creased and folded by hand, he says.
“Our clients love the creasing and our turnaround times have been chopped in half.”
He says they haven’t found any job yet that the folder and autocreaser can’t handle and the two machines are a perfect fit into their copy shop premises.
