Why Mimaki?

• “Quality is everything for us,” Tate says. “It’s what our clients expect from us and we simply have to deliver. That’s why we don’t rush into new technologies – we have to be sure that it will deliver the best results for our clients, in the turnaround times they need and at a price that represents real value for them – particular as they are ‘on-selling’ our service to their clients.
• “We had been searching for some time for a solution which would allow us to produce sign, display and other wide-format print services, but with many of our clients involved in high-end markets like fashion and retail, we had simply been unable to find a solution that met their quality requirements – that is, until we saw Mimaki’s new inkjet heads a couple of years ago.”
• Following this discovery and further discussions with Mimaki and its Australian sales agent, Spicers Sign & Display, Avon invested in its first JFX500-2131, which features Mimaki’s newly developed print heads with variable ink drop size, advanced head control for precise, high-resolution images, and cold-cure UV LED technology, which allows the machine to produce this outstanding print quality on a very wide range of media at speeds of up to 60m2/h.

“Mimaki printers produce as close to offset quality as I’ve ever seen on an inkjet machine, and our customers were immediately delighted with the samples we showed them,” Tate says. “Since then, that quality together with the broad range of products we have been able to offer – which to date has included everything from sign and display, to POP and posters up to A1 in size, polypropylene diary covers and even short runs of ganged-up business cards – has seen this division of our business grow exponentially.”

“It seems like a lot of printers to have running together,” Tate acknowledges , “but the multiple installation base allows us the kind of flexibility we need to cater for virtually anything our clients require.
“We operate in a true ‘on demand’ environment, where it’s common to get a last-minute call for a job that’s needed ‘yesterday’ – or even to see a truck pull up with a job we’re not expecting at all. With our set-up here, we can run five different jobs, or have all machines running the same job to meet a quick turnaround – and, should we need to respond to an urgent request during a production run, we can swap one printer to the rush job and still have 80% of our production working on the longer job.”

“We have always been driven very much by the demands of our customers – if they have overflow work they can’t handle in house due to the substrate or the size, for instance, we find a way to fill that gap in their production capacity,” Tate explains.  

“With these Mimaki printers, our digital cutting equipment and our on-site stock holdings, we can get back to the market really quickly and provide them with a terrific range of services.”

Extending that flexibility are five Mimaki JV300-160 eco-solvent roll-fed printers – a machine Mimaki rates as providing a ‘new global standard’ for print excellence and speed on flexible media – and a TS300P-1800 dye sublimation paper transfer printer which offers similarly outstanding quality, productivity and cost-effectiveness on fabric and textiles.