SOS Print and Media is the latest commercial printer to jump into the growing wide format market, bringing point-of-sale work in-house with new kit.

The Sydney firm has grown turnover seven per cent this year to $30m with 110 staff, and hopes cutting out the middleman will boost its bottom line.

It has installed a Canon Arizona 660XT flatbed printer and a ProCut cutting table for short run work, but will continue to outsource longer run jobs for the time being.

[Related: More wide format news]

Director Michael Schulz says cutting turnaround time is one of the key drivers for entering the market, along with expanding its product range and controlling process.

“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,” he says.

“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.

“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.”

Unlike other printers making huge investments in multiple machines to become big suppliers overnight, Schulz says SOS will take it slowly.

“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,” he says.

“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.”

Schulz says the Arizona 660XT and ProCut were chosen because they are proven technology with lots of local and international experience to back up their reliability.

“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,” he says.

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