Printweek - Me & My: Develop Ineo Label 230

"We were up and printing inside two days"

Back in 2006 Trevor Voisey and his mother Chris set up a new business, Thermal Printer Services in Ashford, Kent. As the name says, it supplied thermal printers and repair services at first.

Eight years later, they decided to extend their operations in actual label, printing, with a Daco narrow-web flexo press and this quickly became the growth engine of the business – today it has three Daco presses. Last year to support a planned move into web-to-print ordering, the firm installed a Develop Ineo Label 230 narrow-web dry toner digital label press, which is the main subject of this Me & My... feature.

If that’s an unfamiliar name, it’s because Develop and Ineo are European brands of Konica Minolta that are mostly aimed at the office sector, but the Label 230 is an industrial label press that’s a rebadging of the AccurioLabel 230. The UK distributer is DSales, and Lemon’s press was supplied and supported by its dealer Officeflow.

Lemon Labels supplies plain and printed labels (flexo, digital, wide-format and variable data barcode labels) for a wide range of industries and customers. Its e-commerce website typically supplies small and medium-sized businesses, manufacturers, e-commerce retailers, food producers. Larger account customers are looked after directly by the customer services team.

Ashford is the main office and production site, with an additional local storage unit taken on recently, but the company also has a sales office in Taunton. In March this year it opened a sales office and trade counter in South Kirkby in West Yorkshire as part of its acquisition of Lynk Data Systems.

In 2022, it bought the online business Labels4kids (www.labels4kids.com), which supplies name labels, tags, stickers, keyrings, clothing, Lego figures and all sorts of other items that can be personalised, because as the website tagline says, “kids lose things”. There’s also a dedicated personalised Lego Minifig site, BuildMeMini (minifigureme.co.uk).

Today it employs eight people directly. Turnover is in excess of £2m and this year to date the sales are up 26%, says Voisey. It’s still very much a family business at heart. “My dad Terry and my sister Natalie joined the business later, and now as mum and dad are preparing to retire, my partner Siobhann has recently joined us.”

The name Lemon Labels was adopted in 2017 as something a little more juicy than Thermal Printer Services. Voisey says: “We wanted a name that was fun, memorable, colourful and ideally one-word, like the mobile phone network Orange. I have a real sweet tooth and all of my favourite deserts are lemon – lemon cheesecake, lemon drizzle cake, lemon sorbet, basically everything is better with lemon! The brand really came to life when a freelance designer I’d worked with sketched up the logo and it just felt like we’d got something.”

Flexo is still a mainstay of the print side, says Voisey. “Approximately 60% of what we do is plain label converting, produced on our Daco PLD350 and Daco DTD250 ‘baby Daco.’ Our DF350SR handles around 25% of our work and is our Swiss Army knife, known as ‘Big Bertha.’ Flexo platemaking is outsourced, he says, to “the brilliant guys over at MPH in Essex”.

The remaining 15% of work is handled by a mix of processes, including the Ineo 230 digital press. There’s a thermal transfer print bureau powered by a fleet of Toshiba TEC thermal printers, and wide-format work handled by Roland DG VG2-640 and VG3-540 inkjets alongside a Vivid laminator and a Graphtec cutter.

The online ordering system was up and running a few months after the digital label printer was installed last summer. it was supplied by Infigo (subject of a Printweek Best of British profile in October/November 2024). “The guys at Infigo have been great and the software is really powerful,” says Voisey. “The main decision to select the Infigo platform was the power of the back office solution and the integrations are almost limitless. It would also integrate with our existing website whilst also allowing us to develop a complete new site for Labels4kids on their hosting platform, all in the same licence.”

Coming soon will be a facelift for the Labels4kids website, a barcode generator, and plans to launch labels that are templated for common uses.

Why go for the Ineo Label 230?

Voisey says “Develop actually found us; we had been looking at different digital options. We spoke to all of the people you can think of – Xeikon, HP, Domino, Konica, Epson – and we had made the decision that it was something we were going to do but we were intending waiting another 12 months as we needed to work on our marketing strategy.

“However Develop reached out to us as they’d heard we were looking and had a machine available, it had been their demo machine. Some of the other options we had looked at came with very high initial costs and service commitments, whereas the Ineo Label 230 comes with a purchase and click-charge arrangement that includes inks and servicing. There is a much lower initial commitment, which was important to us when starting out in a new sector.

“We purchased the machine through Officeflow, a DSales dealer. The click charge, servicing and consumables are handled by Officeflow, who are awesome to deal with – since we installed the Ineo they have installed two photocopiers for us, one in Ashford and one in South Kirkby. DSales was heavily involved in the installation and training, but once commissioned we now deal solely with Officeflow.”

How did installation go?

“Really smoothly; we were up and printing inside two days,” says Voisey. “Installation took a day, with half a day’s training in the afternoon. It was quite funny – they came in the following morning expecting to carry on training, but I’d been in early and I had been impatient, so I had gone to see if I could remember how to use it. So the trainers came in and I was already there printing!”

The press’ AccurioPro RIP has since been integrated with the Infigo web-to-print system.

Last November Lemon Labels installed a new Daco PLD350R flexo press, with added die-cutting with registration to accept the rolls from the digital press for finishing, and a Kocher and Beck adjustable anvil system to help handle thinner PET liners.

How has it been in practise?

The Ineo 230 is being used for the web-to-print work, and for taking shorter runs from the flexo presses. “We retrained one of our flexo operators and one of our wide-format operators,” says Voisey. “It’s really simple to use – and clean compared to flexo! The key is getting the artwork files set up right at the beginning and then it is as simple as dragging in the PDF, checking a few settings and clicking print. The RIP software has a suite of variable data capabilities that have been more than suitable for everything we’ve thrown at it.

“Our only real issues came in the early days with a few paper jams that proved tricky to resolve but as we’ve become more skilled at loading the media this has been far less frequent. We have only had one serious issue that required an engineer to attend and he was with us in under four hours and fixed same day; you can’t ask for more than that.”

So, he’d recommend it to others? “100% we would recommend it and if anyone would like to pop in and see it in action we’d be more than happy to accommodate that!”

SPECIFICATIONS

Technology Dry toner electrophotography

Resolution 1,200x1,200dpi x 8-bit (1,200x3,600dpi equivalent)

Paper widths 250 to 330 mm

Max print image size 1,195x320mm

Max print width 320mm

Media range 81 to 256gsm

Substrates Paper, Yupo, PP, PET

Feed/print speed 23.4m/min standard, less for some media

Footprint 3.9x1.1m

Weight 942kg

Web control Integrated web guide system (BST) on unwinder and rewinder

Options Flexo module

Price About £180,000, although Lemon Labels got a discount for an ex-demo machine

Contact: Develop 0330 118 4442 www.develop-uk.co.uk

COMPANY PROFILE

Lemon Labels is a family business based in Ashford, Kent, with a turnover of £2m-plus and healthy growth. It started as a supplier of thermal label printers and consumables, then moved into flexo label printing, wide format, and most recently dry toner narrow web digital labels. It’s recently moved into web-to-print for general and market-specific (such as children’s) labels, helped by the Ineo Label 230 and Infigo software.

Why it was bought...

Lemon had been looking to move into digital label production and had already spoken with a number of the major digital print manufacturers before it was approached by Develop. The Ineo Label 230 offered significantly lower initial and ongoing costs to the other options, and so MD Trevor Voisey saw an opportunity to get ahead.

How it has performed...

Voisey says: “Definitely we have seen both an improvement on turnround times and a reduction in waste. We are very happy with the investment and have a lot of confidence that over the coming year this piece of kit will form a big part of our growth plans.

“It has added capabilities and supported our wider growth, it’s allowed us to bring in-house work that we would previously have outsourced, and has also made larger variable data barcoding jobs easier to handle. And it is the key piece of our web-to-print projects.”