New City Overnighter Chooses 21st Century Bindery

Islington 24-hour digital print start-up, Mask Documents Ltd, has installed a Horizon BQ-270 TOUCHperfect binder and a Perfecta 76UC precision guillotine supplied by 'first choice' finishing supplier, G.A.E.

MD Julian Mason explains: “Having applied a rigorous procedure to select our pre-press and printing systems we determined to use similar methods when it came to finishing. We challenged the suppliers to demonstrate their machines from a brief we provided. G.A.E gave the best demonstrations, and convinced us that their products are a long way ahead of their rivals. We are very impressed with them as a company.”

Mask Documents began trading in September with Steve Cockerill as Production Director. The short term business plan is to concentrate on servicing City clients requiring quick turnround corporate documents on an overnight basis. Says Mr Mason: “We believe there has been a niche  spine, and that we have the capacity to produce spines up to 50mm thick. We anticipate that 80% of our  workload will be perfect bound on the BQ-270.”

The other essential item in any finishing department is the guillotine. “We think the Perfecta is one of the best guillotines in the industry,” says Mr Mason. “It offers everything you could want in a modern guillotine, it is accurate, safe, easy to use and highly programmable. Most of the time we run using preset formats which are available at the push of a button.”

Mask Documents has an ambitious first year plan. “We've deliberately installed for overcapacity so that we have room to grow quickly,” says Mr Mason. “Although we are starting in a very specialist area, we hope to expand into other types of digital print for the marketing and publishing sectors where we see demand coming from variable data printing in particular.”