Open house showcases Derwent Displays’ investment in Inca Digital Onset X

Print Solutions

Derwent Displays has hailed as a great success, a customer open house event at its factory in Derbyshire. The event on 14 September showcased the latest phase of the company’s successful partnership with Fujifilm and the huge range of possibilities provided by its investment in two Inca Digital Onset X platforms in the past two years. In particular, the event highlighted the range of short run and personalised work that can now be rapidly and reliably turned around without any compromise to quality.

Now celebrating 25 years in the business, Derwent Displays designs and manufactures cardboard displays and packaging, with a strong focus on point of sale work. The company provides an all in one package, from the initial concept to prototyping, printing, cutting and assembly, through to the final delivery. The company’s goal is to raise its turnover from just under £4 million to the £5 million mark and to maintain the same profit margins to allow further investment.

With this growth target in mind, in 2017 Derwent Displays invested in the Onset X1, supplied by Fujifilm. Paul White commercial director commented: ‘Derwent Displays originated as a screen printing company. However, about seven and a half years ago we made the decision to move to digital printing, keeping a limited screen print operation for flood colours and UV varnishing.

‘In our market, the current demand is for fast prototyping and samples for sign off and quick pricing and we needed a machine to help us meet these demands and to help us make our turnover target. So when the time came to upgrade our digital capabilities, the Onset X was the obvious choice. We had looked closely at the Onset S40 some years previously, followed by a live demonstration of the Onset X1 at another Fujifilm customer site. This eventually led to our initial Onset X investment (an X1 platform) in 2017. It offered a significant step up from our original digital provider, both because of its superior speed to quality ratio and because of the reliability of the printheads. The fact that the Onset X is a British product and Fujifilm inks are produced in the UK also appealed to us.’

After operating the Onset X1 for a year, in June 2018, Derwent Displays made its second investment in the Onset X range – this time an Onset X2 with the new automatic robotic arm system. At the same time the company also invested in a new Dyss X9 digital router cutting table bringing Derwent Displays’ total investment in 2017/2018 to £1.75 million. Paul continued, ‘Our remaining press from a previous supplier was seven years old and was producing inferior print quality compared with the Onset X1. We were also experiencing difficulties when transferring work from one printer to the other, which led to issues in the event of any downtime.’

In the short timeframe Derwent Displays has been operating the Onset X2 it has already started to reap the benefits. Paul said, ‘The addition of the Onset X2 has allowed us to explore alternative markets, including small to medium run packaging and point of sale work for brands who have always demanded higher print quality. For example, we are now able to get a good enough result by printing on card to replace printed metal tins for stationery gift packaging.

‘When we stopped screen printing in-house, we had to put work out for UV varnishing, when required. However,the spot UV we achieve with the Onset X1 and X2 means that no time is lost sending work to sub-contractors, resulting in faster turnaround times, with no impact on the quality of the end result.

‘Customer feedback has been very encouraging with a number of customers commenting on how pleased they are with the quality of the products. The reduction in cost has also been positively received, especially on previously printed litho packaging jobs.’