Guest blog by Darren Bacon, Colourfast Financial Managing Director
Colourfast Financial has a rich history dating back more than 100 years.
A history that has traditionally been rooted in all aspects of financial printing from complex Initial Public Offerings to fast turnaround business compliance documents.
To continue to be a service provider of choice on in today’s demanding businesses environment you need to innovate.
That is why we expanded into online B2B and B2C print provision with Getitprinted.com.
It was an ambitious, but carefully considered, move. As we know the world is moving to purchasing products online and it was natural for us to capture some of this market with items such as personalised gifts and jigsaw puzzles.
And one we were happy to get national attention for when one of our products was recently featured on one of Britain’s biggest nationwide channels. ITV’s This Morning is a national institution, and a personalised photo puzzle was gifted to one of the presenters. We have also printed 70 puzzles of metro bank buildings for metro bank, and one of our puzzles was presented to the singer Anne Marie as she likes to do jigsaws.
It demonstrates the power of personalised print supported by high quality print production.
The Getitprinted.com portfolio of services on Ricoh technology were instrumental in production.
Our Ricoh solutions now include three colour sheetfed presses – two Ricoh Pro™ C9200s and a Ricoh Pro™ C7200x and a Ricoh Pro™ TF6251 UV flatbed printer.
Major investments in production technology are always based on costs, speed and quality. It seems that Ricoh gave us everything. We got costs right, speed right and quality right.
We always invest with an eye to the future. New technology has to serve our immediate needs but critically give us the confidence that will help us stay relevant in a fast changing market.
All four systems now manage work across both operations and have been instrumental in securing new contract wins. We can now offer more to our customers and partners.
Ricoh’s EDGE consultancy has been invaluable. It helped us undertake a complete operational review which has resulted in significant growth in print volumes. After reviewing our approaches and procedures we identified ways to be more effective, productive, and profitable.
Was it challenging to go through this transformation process? Self reflection is never easy. We needed to stare at ourselves in the mirror. Standing still was not an option.
Our partnership with Ricoh has given us the edge on our competitors and continues to support our next steps towards growth.
We wanted to work with someone who could see where we wanted to go, help where we wanted to go, so, with a shared vision we could achieve our goals.
Ricoh has also introduced us into other partnerships with other companies. We are now starting to get benefits from that. The online business has gone up 400% in the last few months, and this number is still increasing.
We are really moving forward into markets we didn’t expect to move into. With Ricoh alongside us, we can face the future with confidence.
www.ricoh-europe.com
