Cornwall-based Warrens Bakery has installed an Epson Stylus Pro 7700 inkjet printer to save costs, improve both quality and impact and to increase speed to market by producing A1 and A2 promotional posters in-house.
Founded in 1860, Warrens Bakery has expanded steadily from its Penzance, Cornwall site and today has 60 shops in the South-West, as far afield as Barnstaple and Exeter. The vast majority are branded as Warrens Bakery and sell a range of baked goods from traditional pasties and saffron cakes to hampers and Christmas puddings. Two stores carry the recently-launched Simply Cornish brand, which also supports an online shop at www.simplycornish.com, and sells an extended range of up market, locally produced fine foods.
Warrens runs regular promotions throughout its stores, often timed to coincide with saints’ days or local village events, but producing posters and other point-of-sale materials to support these was difficult and expensive, with quality restrictions on externally-sourced digital print.
Graphic and web designer Martin Sanders was tasked with finding a suitable large-format printer that would provide the productivity, flexibility and quality to bring poster production in-house. He selected an Epson Stylus Pro 7700 from specialist supplier Digital Photo Solutions.
“We had an older printer that had come to the end of its life, so we had stopped producing anything larger than A3,” explains Sanders, adding, ”we were outsourcing A3 posters but it was costing too much to produce the A1 and A2 posters in the short runs and with the fast turnaround we needed. Time is very much of the essence for us and the Stylus Pro 7700 provided the right mix of speed and quality for us. We were all happy with the previous Epson printer so were confident that this would be suitable.”
Sanders also considered the Stylus Pro 7900 but felt that because the SP7700 is faster it was more suited to point-of-sale work. With its 1440 x 1440 dpi resolution, image and text quality are more than sufficient for large format display production, and Epson’s UltraChrome ink set with Vivid Magenta technology gives a wide gamut suitable for reproducing both photographic product images and brand colours.
“We had been using an office-type printer for smaller jobs and external digital print services for larger items, handing off jobs as PDFs, but the spot colours weren’t coming out right either way,” says Sanders. Printing to the Stylus Pro 7700 using the Epson driver and standard settings we’re seeing much better colour accuracy already.”
The Stylus Pro 7700 has already demonstrated its production speed too; Sanders reports that in four hours he was able to print 30 A1 [841 x 594 mm] sheets, ready to be cut down into A2 posters, enough to equip all 60 retail stores. “It’s quick and quiet in operation, too,” he adds.
Now that it’s practical and cost-effective to produce the large format posters in-house, Warrens Bakery will be able to respond more quickly to localised market opportunities and changing consumer trends and preferences, with high quality eye-catching point-of-sale materials. The implementation of a Shiraz RIP is also expected to boost productivity further by maximising economical usage of stock when printing multiple sizes in mixed-job batches.
