FIVE years ago, Elegant Foil moved into new premises in Gosforth Park, Germiston as part of its diversification strategy. Its aim was to build a complete niche trade finishing operation comprising the production of foiling blocks and laser cut dies, hot foil stamping, embossing, laminating, narrow and wide-format digital printing and packaging.

The team has noticed an entrepreneurial spirit in the current constrained economy, with around 20 enquiries per week on its website for small digital packaging runs of 1 000 to 2 000 items. According to MD Brad Frew, these entrepreneurs are looking to create something special and Elegant Foil’s combination of in-house design agency skills and digital printing and finishing capabilities can assist them to go to market within five days.

‘We partner with customers who are prepared to grow with a small business, which is in contrast to other trade finishing companies with standard minimum orders of 5 000 and lead times of several weeks,’ Brad explains. ‘Our success over the past 34 years has been built on the foundation of offering personalised service, not promising what we can’t deliver, always being a trusted partner that our customers call fall back on and investing in new technologies to meet changing market needs.’

Sample cutting magic

The latest example of this approach is the investment in an iECHO PK 0705 Plus automatic digital cutting plotter from Alliance Machinery to bring the growing digital packaging sample work, which it had to send out to third party providers for cutting, back in-house. ‘With this digital die-cutter, we’ve taken control of the quality of the work and turnaround times and eliminated the cost of around R600 or R700 to make a die for each short packaging run of 500, 700 or 1 000. Additionally, we can achieve further differentiation on packaging, labels that require a tight registration of 0.5mm, invitations, business cards, signage and point of sale materials such as table talkers, pop-ups and wobbler arms because this type of intricate cutting is difficult to achieve on a standard platen,’ he states. ‘The benefits were evident when we recently produced 50 intricate wedding invitations digitally on fewer than 10 sheets – compared to around 200 sheets to make-ready conventionally – resulting in much less waste and cost savings that we could pass on to the customer.’

Thanks to the creasing, cutting and oscillating tools that are suitable for a wide range of materials, Elegant Foil is also able to do the digital die-cutting work for other printers when it isn’t their speciality and they can’t justify the investment in this type of technology.

Brad explains that Elegant Foil has historically enjoyed the professional level of service, transparency and honesty from the Beswick Group, which includes Fellowes Beswick, Beswick Machinery and Alliance Machinery, and the long-term partnership approach it shares.

‘I have a very good relationship with Bradley Bate, MD of Alliance Machinery, as he used to be the sales director when I owned Collage Litho. I trusted his recommendation in terms of the iECHO PK 0705 Plus automatic digital cutting plotter, which is an easy-to-operate system that offers all the bells and whistles for short-run, on-demand print work at a cost-competitive price point,’ he reports.

Bradley adds that the iECHO system’s main differentiators are its precision cutting quality at a maximum speed of 1 000mm/sec thanks to the automatic vision registration system and enhanced capabilities provided by the dedicated packaging design software from Arden.

He explains that the PK 0705 Plus’s automatic precision vision registration system is powered by a high-definition CCD camera positioned on the cutting head that prevents manual positioning. The camera reads the digitally printed registration marks on all four corners of the sheet and cuts to those printed marks with complete accuracy.

Additionally, using the latest version of Arden’s software, Elegant Foil can quickly and easily generate carton designs from an extensive FEFCO corrugated standards library or an array of mix-and-match options. ‘Designs can be visualised on screen in the 3D fold-up facility to check for functionality and customer pre-approval before manufacturing samples for final testing and approval,’ Bradley notes. ‘The ability to show customers what can be done with digital samples before getting to the die-making stage, if they require longer production runs, is an added value service.’

Elegant Foil can choose to receive after-sales assistance online or on-site from the Beswick Group’s electrical and electronic engineers, who work closely in conjunction with iECHO’s factory via WeChat connection to detect and solve any problems. Additionally, label and narrow web product manager Kevin Tucker, who has had extensive training on the Arden package design software, is on hand to assist with related queries.

Bradley also points out that Alliance Machinery offers stockholding of the comprehensive range of tooling for the PK0705 (750 x 530mm) and PK0604 (600 x 400mm) Standard and Plus models as well as the new PK1209 Pro, which has a larger cutting bed size of 1 200 x 900mm to accommodate the needs of commercial and packaging printers. Tooling includes kiss-cut tools for self-adhesive labels and vinyls, electric oscillating knives for foam or board (up to 6mm thick on the PK0705 and PK0604 models and 10mm on the PK1209 Pro) and pneumatic creasing tools (enabling pressures of up to 4kg) for folding carton and corrugated board.

‘We’re excited to see how Elegant Foil has grown and diversified its customer base and service offerings over the years to become a leader in the trade finishing market,’ Bradley enthuses. ‘We are proud that they’ve entrusted Alliance Machinery to help them on their digital die-cutting journey.’

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