There is a clear trend that printers based in the central Mumbai districts of Lower Parel, Byculla and Prabhadevi are gradually moving out of the city to northern suburbs like Bhiwandi, Vasai, and other places. Lack of adequate space for expansion, inefficiencies due to fragmented operations and the desire to cash in on high real estate prices are some of the reasons that are driving printers to make the move northwards of the city. For Prabhadevibased commercial printer Unik Printers, the trigger was space constraints. The idea of shifting out of its 2,500 square foot unit first came up in 2007. After years of scouting, land was bought in 2012 and construction at the new premises started a year later. First, operations at the Bhiwandi unit began in October 2014. Work is now in the final stages at the 65,000 square foot space and the plant will be fully ready by September 2016 and the whole unit would be in use by November this year.
“The biggest reason for Unik to expand in Bhiwandi was that our Prabhadevi plant was not big enough to handle the work we were getting. Also, we wanted a fully integrated and independent plant with all departments in-house and under one roof. We wanted to stay away from the fragmented gala system,” says Ankul Nanavaty, director-business development, Unik Printers. “The Bhiwandi unit is about 65,000 square foot in area out of which we will use about 27,000 square foot once it is fully up and running. Currently we are using about 14,000 square foot.”
In terms of equipment, the Bhiwandi unit has a 4-color Ryobi press, offline UV coater, three folding machines, three cutting machines, three knife trimmers, punching machine, case making machine, pinning machine, two perfect binders – one six clamp and one single clamp and two section sewing machines. In addition to all of these, the plant also has a complete line of automatic envelop making line consisting of window patching, auto gumming and auto pasting features. The plan is to continue with one offset press for the near future. However, Nanavaty stresses that if given a choice he would buy a 5-color Ryobi with coater. “But the time is not right to go in for another press,” he says.
Magic is in postpress
Nanavaty operates Unik with the philosophy that postpress or the finishing processes add the real magic to the final product. All the postpress equipment that Unik has are brand new and from leading Indian and global suppliers. “Today print is manageable because there is lot of spare capacity but it is the binding, the postpress processes that add the real magic to the whole printing process. A print job only gets a character after it is bound. However, unfortunately our industry does not pay much attention to this fact,” he argues.
When Unik was investing in the hardware, Nanavaty says, it was the postpress equipment that were bought first and the press was the last piece of hardware to be bought. When asked about his opinion on postpress technology like Scodix, he says it is a great technology. “I have had a look at the technology and was extremely impressed. It is fantastic in terms of its capability. However, I believe a Scodix is meant for very focussed value addition jobs. Its limited scalability is a drawback given the high stakes involved,” Nanavaty adds.
Leveraging the World Wide Web
Keeping up with the times, Unik has fully leveraged the internet to expand its business. Few years back it launched a web-to-print site, www.getquickprints.com, to fulfil the print requirements of retail customers. Customers can choose the design from the pre-loaded templates or upload their own artwork and print business cards, letterheads and envelopes. The corporate customers are handled by a separate backend. The corporate module has about 40,000 active users from seven customers. These jobs are being done on a Xerox digital press at the company’s Prabhadevi unit.
“We are trying to add one customer every quarter. Our aim is to have more than 100,000 users in the near future. Currently this segment is small in our portfolio but we see huge potential for growth. I believe one can profitably use the new technology by carving out a niche,” Nanavaty says.
