Founded in 2010, Shubham Paper Products at Kandivali’s Akruli Industrial Estate, provides a full range of print finishing services including wire binding, plastic spiral binding, collating and shrink wrapping. Recently, they have installed Renz 500 – a wire binding machine.
Sanjay Yagnik, owner of Shubham says, “Last year, we produced around 15,000 diaries a year. With Renz, our capacity has increased by more than 50%. From the date of installation that is from November 2015, we have been able to produce more than 1 lakh diaries in less than a year. Renz 500 is a versatile machine which is easy to use with quick makeready times and the ability to handle all the calendar and binding work.”
Renz 500 is a semi-automatic, mobile binding machine that can bind books and calendars from 50 mm to 500 mm. This investment was done with the intention of having an automatic unit and expanding the business. Talking about the impact on the diary business, Yagnik confirms that there is hardly any effect on it. Diaries are also provided along with expensive pens and sold as branded products for personal and professional use. Nowadays, different diaries with leather cloth and hot foil stamping on book covers have come to the market.
The core competence of Shubham lies in making conceptbased diaries. For instance, ‘Water the color and the call of India,’ is a dairy based on the concept – if water isn’t saved in the coming five years then India will be in trouble. The left side of the pages are printed with images of water while the right side is used for writing. In the last few pages of the diary there are pictures of a drought in order to make the users realize the impact about the scarcity of water. Such diaries have been gifted to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other Members of Parliament.
Similarly, Shubham has come up with a set of eye-catching diaries for pregnant women. The set consists of two diaries, one diary explains the benefits of writing and the other is meant for writing an account about the nine months of pregnancy. “Writing at the time of pregnancy is a good habit and post pregnancy the diary can be kept as an album which can be easily referred to by family members in future,” says Yagnik. Presently, he is on the lookout for a case-making machine by ST which is made in China and Kolbus is in talks with an app developer to introduce diaries produced in-house to the digital world.
The use of finishing effects such as Spot UV, abrasive UV and metallic inks on book covers and writing pages urge the users to read the printed content and inculcate the habit of writing. Such books have been translated into six different Indian languages. The translation of content and designing and printing of the diaries is outsourced. Currently, Shubham has outsourced the translation of a book in Chinese language and plans to export the book.