Rochester, UK-based PressOn has been named the winner of the FESPA Gold Award for In-store Project of the Year 2014.
Facing stiff competition from some of the World’s most prestigious printers, PressOn scooped the award for its luxury retail client’s Christmas 2013 windows and accompanying lift graphics. The winners of the FESPA Awards were announced at the FESPA Gala Dinner in Munich on 22 May 2014 and Andy Wilson, Managing Director of PressOn was there to accept the award.
The award judges for the In-Store Project of the Year were looking for excellence in print quality and creativity along innovation and creativity in the winning printed project. “The Christmas Express” window graphics were judged as being worthy of the coveted Gold award. The winning Christmas window displays produced by PressOn were for a retail store that is famous globally. The shop windows are a tourist attraction in their own right in London. The printed technical execution of these finished graphics needed to be perfect to achieve the flawless stunning visual effect the client demanded.
“The Christmas Express” was a series of train carriages across 11 store windows and an accompanying series of lift graphics that needed to be installed over one night. The final printed execution of the train needed the metallic solidity of a real train. The overall design was complex and challenging technically for PressOn to achieve and required its in-house team to develop many artwork files and to conduct many printing trials to obtain the desired effect for the windows.
PressOn needed to print on silver metallic vinyl and then recreate printed steam across the finished print. The steam effect was achieved using the EFi VUTEk QS2Pro 2’s 3-layer ink capability. PressOn printed different densities of white ink on metallic sections of the train to achieve the effect of steam. The main complication during printing was the reflection from the metallic vinyl interfering with the UV curing lamp. Even the manufacturers of the VUTEk told PressOn it could not be done. After lengthy and labour-intensive trials, the perfect effect of transparent and opaque sections of steam was achieved and the client was delighted with the realistic result.
Andy Wilson comments, “We are so thrilled to have won this award and for such a prestigious project. I’ve never won anything before and this is an amazing first for me and more importantly for everyone at PressOn. Recognition for our technical expertise at this level, from FESPA no less, is the highlight of the past 14 years of our desire to grow PressOn. All thanks go to our loyal and hard-working PressOn team.”
Winning this award follows a 24 month period of investment and rapid growth at PressOn. Over the past two years PressOn launched a new customer focused website, a revolutionary online print calculator and invested heavily in state of the art machinery with the purchase of the World’s first HP LX3000, an EFi VUTEk QS2 Pro and most recently the World’s first HP LX360.
