Just 200 km from the national capital Delhi and 45 km from Chandigarh lies Ambala. Located in Haryana but close to the Punjab border, the city has a large presence of the Indian Army and Indian Air Force in its cantonment area.
Within the confines of Ambala Cantt is Printfection Ambala, a subsidiary of ColorDrop, which was set up in 2017 by Tanuj Chopra. The print shop offers services for the foiling and luxury embellishment of print products such as books, catalogs, brochures, leaflets, and pamphlets as well as monocartons for luxury packaged goods and wedding cards and boxes.
It also offers in-house binding services to clients across India but is mostly concentrated in the North Indian territories of Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi-NCR.
Printfection Ambala recently installed a Konica Minolta AccurioShine 3600 print embellishment machine to provide embossing and foil finish services to its clientele. Tanuj Chopra, director of Printfection Ambala, says he has received excellent support from the Konica Minolta team during and after the installation and seemed to be more than satisfied with the “excellent experience” so far.
Apart from the Konica Minolta AccurioShine 3600, Printfection has a Xerox Versant digital press. Word has spread in the nearby areas and customers in a circumference of 100 km are approaching Chopra with work based on his recent installation of the KM machine because of its quality, he said in a recent telephonic interaction with Indian Printer & Publisher.
Though only 1.5 months old in the print embellishment space, Printfection Ambala is working with B2B businesses, cosmetic manufacturers, FMCG startups, wedding cards and boxes manufacturers and pharmaceutical product manufacturers.
Chopra said, “This is a privileged machine with which the sky is the limit – it’s all about using your imagination and how your designers make the most out of it. It has a lot of potential and in-built features, which help us truly delight our clients by overachieving their expectations.”
A lot of startups have sprung up in India post-Covid and everyone wants better packaging, he said, adding customers are ready to spend two to three times the worth of their products on packaging as customers are very influenced by luxury packaging. What one sees, sells – sales are mostly dependent on how elegant the products look on the retail shelves, he said.
“With the growing market for holography, gold and silver have become commonplace colors. Clients now want to experiment with red and blue embellishments and newer textures on wedding cards and boxes and cosmetics packaging,” he said. The Konica Minolta AccurioShine 3600 comes with 20 preset textures, which is an added advantage, he said, adding the quality and precision of embossing is marvelous.
He said Prinfection, though in its infant stages, has seen tremendous growth in the last 1.5 months. Though the setup still is experiencing some teething problems, the word-of-mouth publicity has ensured a steady stream of orders. One of the problems the company experienced was a lack of skilled labor for the machines, which it has overcome with regular training, Chopra said. Going forward, he plans to install a Ricoh to expand the embellishment offerings.
