Seagull Press

Digital print takes full flight at Seagull Press. Investing in Ricoh has helped turn an out of date suburban printshop into a thriving digital business.

Seagull Press, based in Melbourne’s eastern suburb of Belgrave, knows how to stand out from the crowd. A true small family business, Seagull Press caters for the local business community around Melbourne and interstate, with an enviable service reputation that has spread largely by word of mouth. It was not always so.

“The business was very close to closing its doors when Denise and I bought it in 2003,” Dan Kuhl said. The business was stuck in 1970s technology, and everything had to be done manually.” Dan and Denise Kuhl set to work in re-establishing the business. That meant investing in new technology to suit local demand, and building lasting business relationships. “We bought a Heidelberg GTO52 two-colour press, and sorted out our offset side of the business.” said Dan, who served his apprenticeship in letterpress printing in England.

But it is digital print products that have driven much of the company’s growth in the past few years. “We were getting a lot of people asking for print jobs that we knew we had to do digitally, so we sent it down the road. We ended up outsourcing so much work we decided to put a digital press on the floor,” he said. The Kuhls ventured into digital print some years ago with a small machine, but quickly outgrew it and upgraded. All too soon, with the growth in business volume that their digital print capabilities had attracted, the Kuhls realised that their business had to take the bull by the horns by investing in a digital press with much greater capacity.

A transformation with Ricoh

“We went to PacPrint13 when I noticed the Ricoh stand. We inspected a press on the stand and the Ricoh engineer gave us a full demonstration. It was obviously very robust. We looked very closely at what it was producing, and then spent over a year thinking about it before we took it on,” said Dan. Seagull Press installed a Ricoh Pro C7100X digital press several months ago, since then it has transformed the company’s print operations.“I love it” chortles Dan. “Register and colour are spot on. It is the quality we like, and its ease of operation is fantastic. Denise operates it most days and loves it too.” The key markets at Seagull Press includes digital booklets, business cards, docket books, stationery, brochures and flyers – "just about anything that needs quality colour print" says Dan.

Meeting demands with the Ricoh Pro C7100X

“We can handle banner printing, A4 landscapes and trifolds. We can also use the Ricoh to do white and clear toner print for special projects, especially in short runs. It is much more cost-effective than our previous digital machine, and has really lifted the amount of work we can do.” As the Ricoh Pro C7100X easily handles longer print runs, with the advantages of some inline finishing, the business no longer runs its offset press very often and Dan is not tied to the press all day. This enables the Kuhls to produce larger work volumes without the need for more staff.

“With the Ricoh we are always ready to take on new challenges. You have to be versatile in business to satisfy customer needs. The Ricoh Pro C7100X has certainly given us that capability.”