Pioneering print business SOS is entering the wide format sector with a Canon Arizona 660XT flatbed printer, and a Pro Cut cutting table. SOS has grown its business which prints both offset and digital by some seven per cent in the last 12 months. The move into wide format will see it produce some POS material in-house, although it will still outsource longer run jobs.
Michael Schulz, director of SOS
Speaking with Australian Printer, Michael Schulz, director of SOS, says he is excited about the new wide format kit as it will allow the company to produce short run work in-house. Schulz says, “I love this technology, it is fascinating if you look at how the printer and the cutter work and the software behind it. “You can do really cool things with it. You can do something completely different to a conventional printed product. So you can suddenly create desks, and standees and Father Christmas cut-outs and that kind of stuff.” He says one of the main reasons for SOS, which has an approximate yearly turnover of $30m, to enter the booming market is to react to clients’ needs fast. Schulz says, “What we often find is that we need to produce prototypes, where we need to try out things, and doing that outside is really expensive and takes time.” “And it’s also challenging to outsource prototypes because when it comes back the client wants to make changes and then we have to send it out again. We are just unable to react as quickly as we would like to.”
Arizona 660XT
Schulz says, “At the moment we outsource our wide format work and that will stay that way because there is no way that we could invest into production that large. “Obviously we are going to run quick on demand jobs in-house but we are under no illusion that with one printer and one cutter that we are suddenly going to be a mass producer of point-of-sale material. That’s not going to happen. “For us to produce all of our wide format jobs in-house we need to have a lot of equipment and we need to hold a lot of stocks, and increase our production capacity. “With one machine and one cutter you can get your toes wet, you can do some things but you can’t do everything.” He says SOS, which employs some 110 full time staff and has more than 30 casual workers on its books for bigger projects, invested in the Canon Arizona after a lengthy research phase. Schulz says, “We had a look at what’s out there in the market, we compared some machines and we did the same in Brisbane, where SOS has another factory called CPX, which is doing the same thing and going into wide format. “We had a look in the market here and international to see what people are using, what’s proven. We also wanted to ensure not to get hit with a massive capital investment, and minimise the risk but still get equipment with good quality. And Canon has been pretty good to deal with and they have offered us an arrangement that was good for us.”
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