A Sydney printer is already reaping the rewards of acquiring a stationery business late last year, bringing in hundreds of new customers and increasing its in-house work.

Wedding stationery retailer Amazing Paper has just begun operating from the top floor of digital and pre-press firm Imagination Graphics’ Marrickville facility, customising anything from invitations to wrapping paper for happy couples and sending it downstairs for printing and finishing.

Imagination’s owner Emmanuel Buhagiar says the acquisition has doubled his wedding stationary printing to the point where it now accounts for 30 per cent of his business and drives sales for other print products.

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“Couples go back to work after their honeymoon and tell their colleagues about us, so their companies will come to us for flyers, annual reports or business cards,” he says.

“Having everything under one roof has worked out well for everyone, feeding off each other’s contacts and doing everything on site.”

Former Amazing Paper owner Kevin Jeffers-Palmer, who ran the retailer for 20 years before selling it to Imagination Graphics, has stayed on board to make it business as usual for his more than 500 clients.

He says he will act as the main point of contact for Amazing Paper customers and liaise with the printing side of the business on their behalf.

“I try to make it easy for customers and offer them a range of stock and customisable options, so they might want a well designed invitation sent out in off the rack envelopes – and now we can do it all here as a one-stop shop," he says.

Customers can also get handcrafted custom binding from his wife Rosemary’s Sydney Bookbinding business which has also moved in to the top floor while remaining independent, spinning off even more business for the other companies.

“We’re building something special here, better than the old crowded retail shop,” she says.

Jeffers-Palmer says Buhagiar approached him to buy the business after acting as Amazing Paper’s main printer for 18 months, and he was enticed by the opportunity to take the business to the next level by offering customers a complete solution.

He says his and Buhagiar’s shared interested in quality customer service was a big reason why the deal happened.

“He shares our vision of what a business should be – it’s just as important to offer a high degree of service and respect as it is to run a professional business,” he says.

“Many of our customers are from personal referrals as a direct result of this.”

Building relationships as a means of growing the business is a passion of Buhagiar’s. He throws weekly barbeques for his staff, clients and suppliers and collaborates with nearby businesses to pool their strengths on bigger jobs.

Imagination has no offset presses, outsourcing this work to John Fisher Printing (regular barbeque attendees) but in turn having many printers outsource their pre-press work to it.

“We all back each other up with quality work,” Buhagiar says.

He says the company has just gained multiple big graphic design agencies as clients in the past few months and will start printing for a supermarket chain from mid this year.

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Imagination also has a thriving trade business that makes up 60 per cent of its takings (it was as high as 80 per cent before so much in-house work flowed from Amazing Paper), using a Konica Minolta Bizhub Press C8000 bought last August for short-run digital work on business cards, brochures and magazines, a Bizhub Pro C6501, and an Epson Stylus Pro 11880 wide-format printer.

“The C8000 prints so well and so quickly and the registration is good. The colour is so close to offset it's unbelievable,” Buhagiar says.

“Because we’re a pre-press company, we know colour and its very important to us.”

It was also the first Australian firm to order Apogee Storefront for its Agfa web-to-print software, while Amazing Paper continues to use its Sitesweep-based portal.

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