New Agfa engines ensure increased orders are satisfied at Solopress

Print Solutions

Solopress has invested in two new Anapurna hybrid UV-LED printers to satisfy its rapidly growing wide format business.

The Anapurna H2500i LED systems were installed just four weeks ago and have been running 24 hours a day, six days a week ever since, helping to satisfy a healthy increase in orders during May. The new 2.5 metre wide hybrid engines not only print at twice the speed of the printers they replaced, the cost of ink has halved due to Agfa’s Thin Ink Layer Technology. They also enabled Solopress to offer rigid print product

‘We are in a strong growth phase on wide format where we are seeing

35 to 40% growth year on year,’ said Simon Cooper, Solopress managing director.

‘We were looking at the next step on our wide format journey and the Agfa Anapurna is quite uniquely positioned as a quality hybrid at the right price point, enabling us to buy two machines for failover and massively increasing our capacity. It may be early days, but the quality of the machines has surpassed our expectations and the sleek installation and training meant we were up and running in just a few days. We have been very impressed with both the service from Agfa and the product performance. It has been a positive experience so far from a new supplier to the business.’

Left to right: Paul Fitch, Agfa, Jack Clifford head of operations and Simon Cooper managing director at Solopress.

Solopress became part of Onlineprinters two years ago. Solopress is based Southend-on-Sea. The company is 20 years old this year and started, as the name implies, as a one man, one press set up. A key turning point for the business was in 2005 when it started a serious online platform which has grown sales exponentially, now over £30 million a year, with a large proportion of orders coming via its online portal.

Simon concluded, ‘We have a loyal customer base. We service them well and they appear to be happy working with us, so growth is now coming from new products. The Agfa printers are a great example of this growth plan and they couldn’t have come at a better time, we certainly would not have coped with the influx of orders received in May without them.’