Solopress: iGenuinely Fast Printers

Written by Rik Haynes
Online Marketing and PR
Solopress.com

Solopress.com was established in 1999 and specialises in printing premium quality business cards, leaflets, brochures, stationery, posters, banners and other promotional materials for next day delivery anywhere in the UK. We’re based in Southend-on-Sea, Essex – just 45 miles away from central London – and turned over £8.5m last year. Solopress.com currently employ a friendly team of 120 handpicked people, each with a passion for printing.
With a growing customer base of over 80,000 businesses and individuals from across the UK, we needed a digital printing solution to help us meet our demanding print schedules and volumes, all while complementing our lithographic printing equipment. In the end, the Xerox iGen4 digital press was the perfect choice for us. When we first dipped our toe into digital printing in 2006, Xerox was the first port of call because of the company’s history, advanced technology and our existing business relationship using Xerox copiers. They haven’t proved us wrong. Two Xerox 700s and five years later, we needed a high performance digital printer in 2011 to cope with our increasing number of daily orders. As it was a big investment for Solopress.com, we did look at alternatives such as the Indigo. But the high speed iGen4 was the perfect fit for our business module of fast 24-hour turnaround products that still retain the highest print quality possible.
The iGen4’s reliability was another huge contributing factor in our decision. With such incredibly tight deadlines, we simply can’t afford to have downtime. Even though it is a large, industrial looking machine, we were very pleased that the iGen4 maintains simplistic characteristics similar to that of a small Xerox copier – such as easily replaceable parts, which saves us from having to wait for an engineer. Within two weeks our staff were fully trained up on the iGen4. Soon we were printing higher run lengths on it, rather than running them on our Heidelberg Speedmaster 74/5 litho presses.
In our experience, the iGen4 is particularly good at printing brochures, flyers and leaflets with true colours and near perfect registration. We’ve now added a second iGen4 to our digital department, doubling our capacity in an instant and also enabling us to introduce a new customer order deadline of 2pm for next day delivery to anywhere in the mainland UK (customers have always been able to order up to 8pm for next day delivery to London and the surrounding areas as it’s so close to our factory).
We’re now on the way to making 10 million impressions on Solopress.com’s two iGen4s over the next 12 months. Our iGen4 ‘twins’ are a big part of the Solopress.com family and success story… you can even spot one of them in a video showcasing the Solopress capabilities. So the next time you’re in the UK and need any printing in a hurry, we invite you to visit Solopress.com and our ‘twins’ to see first-hand how we are staying true to our promise of ‘print delivered in 24 hours’