Format Finishing doubles down on the A4 landscape market, adding a second VAC-600 L tower to its brand new Horizon SPF-200 L booklet-maker. Since the mid-2013 Currie install Format has grown its business as the only shop offering landscape Horizon finishing on the west coast, and work is on the rise.
A Perth institution for more than two decades Format Finishing has built a reputation on service and quality. Founded in 1992 by Violetta Siudek, managing director, the business has steadily grown over the years with a solid core in the real estate market, work that Siudek says has increasingly turned into the landscape space.
“We were looking for a saddle-stitch machine with the landscape facility. Format Finishing tends to specialise in small to medium runs, targeting digital print mainly. We were getting a lot of books going landscape and really the only way we could finish them was by hand,” said Siudek.
- Violetta Siudek (managing director, Format Finishing) and Harvey Sadd (Currie)
According to Siudek, landscape work took up near on 30% of Format’s jobs at the time, and now that figure is only growing. With a target in sight, Siudek picked up the Horizon SPF-200 L hot off the Currie Group stand back at PacPrint 2013. Making its local debut at the Melbourne trade show, the SPF-200 L offers fully automated set-up via touchscreen display, finishing work specced from 120 x 100 all the way up to 320 x 300.
The booklet-maker touched down at Format Finishing in August with just the one VAC-600 L tower in tow, handling jobs up to 20 pages plus covers. Since the install, though, increased productivity has pushed those page-counts up, leading Siudek to make her latest investment.
“When we first picked up the system originally I purchased only one tower. I was thinking it would be enough. Maybe 80% of books were under 24 pages, but once we introduced A4 landscape to our customers I started finding page counts going up. We were getting 36 pages, 40-plus pages,” she says.
The new tower brings Format’s landscape capacity up to 48 pages with full automation, ratcheting up turnarounds while still delivering top quality. Siudek highlights that the VAC-600 L towers can load up to 1000 sheets, maximising production throughput for Format Finishing’s trade work.
According Siudek, “I can generate so much more work out of this. Before it could take me a minimum of a day to get some jobs stitched and finished, but now with the two towers I can turn around 1000 books in a couple of hours. Out the door the same day. It saves time, saves labour, the quality is better and price-wise we can pass along those savings to our customers.”
Format Finishing has expanded over the years to now employ 15 full-time, with a healthy roster of casuals manning the towers in peak periods. Siudek founded the business with a Horizon picked up from Currie, and has grown the business with the Currie Group ever since.
“The Horizon is a great machine. It’s simple to operate and very efficient, and we’ve always found the service from Currie Group to be excellent,” says Siudek.