Cape Town-based Creative Brands, a corporate branding and printing company, has added a Xerox X1000 Digital Colour Press to its range of industry-leading printing, packaging and design technology. The machine which was purchased from Oxbow and Bytes Document Solutions aims to boost productivity, efficiency and image quality for its customers.
Based in Woodstock, the company creates exceptional branded materials for major global and local brands such as Google South Africa and Adidas. These include customised stationery, brochures and flyers, wallpapers, display boards, packaging, clothing and giftware.
“Our two areas of focus are the customer and the brand, so colour, consistency, competitive differentiation and quality are all crucial,” says Creative Brands director Richard Jermyn.
“We give our customers a one-stop turnkey solution that exceeds expectations, from concept design to colour matching, printing, packaging, production, warehousing and distribution,” says Jermyn.
“While we don’t do everything for every client, we focus on the overall solution as part of a project or campaign, not individual print runs like a more traditional print shop or design house. In that way, we’re completely different and better-equipped than other printing companies since that is just one side of our overall business.”
The Xerox X1000 is the latest in a long line of Xerox digital printers the company identified for its short-run, smaller-format printing requirements as part of production that includes massive wide-format toner and vinyl printers, board printers, laser cutters and folding machines.
“In the past we have looked at other brands in this particular printing space but nothing else comes close to the true production capabilities of the Xerox X1000,” says Jermyn.
“It has incredibly strong Pantone colour matching functionality that’s an essential component of professional corporate printing. This means we can guarantee that the colour on business cards sent to new staff members in George matches the colour used on pens in Johannesburg and on flyers in Durban. It’s just one aspect of protecting the integrity of a brand, but also a very important one, so we have to get it right every single time.”
The Xerox X1000 Press ships with a set of colour management tools called Automated Color Quality Suite (ACQS) that automate time- consuming daily tasks such as colour calibration and profiling. In addition to ACQS, the X1000’s Full-Width Array also delivers image-to-media alignment, allowing an operator to automatically adjust for front-to-back registration, perpendicularity, skew and magnification and create and store custom paper and alignment profiles for different paper stocks.
The X1000 also features Xerox’s unique low melt EA (Emulsion Aggregation) Dry Ink technology that uses no fuser oil, giving all applications a smooth offset-like finish. With one of the highest-definition print engines on a production-grade press, the 2400x2400dpi-capable engine prints on heavy stock media up to 350gsm at full speed, with a seamless Intermediate Belt Transfer (IBT) system that provides even greater versatility, speed and reliability.
“For a specialist company like Creative Brands that delivers customised, highly-visible products to customers with a vast footprint across the country, consistency, quality, accuracy and reliability are non-negotiable,” says Oxbow brand manager Sonia Cupido. “We work closely with our clients to make sure the machines we sell and configure for them are purpose-built, then let them get on with doing the great work they do. Chances are if quality starts dropping off over time it’s because they’ve hit the physical limits of the machine and are strategically ready for the next step up in technology.”
Jermyn agrees: “The only time we’ve had issues with a Xerox machine is when we’ve physically pushed it further than it was designed to go. If the fine print says we can’t use media heavier than 300gsm, we’ll use 400gsm to see how it goes. That’s the nature of our business. More often than not the machine handles it with ease, allowing us to push the creative boundaries for our customers and create even better products than they initially envisioned. It’s all about using the best equipment possible to help us make a real statement with our products, and ultimately that’s what our customers come to us for.”
