Same-day Envelopes Enhance Popularity of Texas In-plant

“Wow” seems to be the reaction when Glen Bradford tells his customers that his in-plant can now produce envelopes in the same day. Bradford, manager of Texas Christian University’s Printing & Copying/Frog Prints Copy Center in Fort Worth, Texas, credits this quick turnaround to the new Intoprint DP 100 digital envelope printing system, installed last December.

“We added the DP 100 to give us better production capabilities for short-run projects that are under 1,000 impressions,” Bradford explains. “We were finding that our demand for specialty envelopes, like announcements, A2, A6 and A7 sizes, were not cost effective for us to produce on an offset press.”

Bradford looked at several devices with feeder systems, but chose the DP 100 because he was impressed with its ease of use and the quality of its output.

“The color calibration is also very good on the unit,” he notes. “We use a PMS 268 as our university’s purple color, which is hard to duplicate on a digital system, but the DP 100 has done a really good job with that.”

Prior to the DP 100, the five-employee in-plant was running envelopes on a Multi 1250 with a T-head. It has since moved some of the volume off of the press—such as the production of #10s, #9 BREs, A-2 through Lee sizes, panel card announcements and invitations—to the IntoPrint. The in-plant can also produce two-sided 10x13˝ envelopes in-house, which it previously had to outsource.

“We have a unique situation in our operation here in that we sell to students, departments, organizations and faculty/staff,” adds Bradford. “Through our Frog Prints Copy Center, we also serve students, local businesses and individuals. We are in a shopping center area directly across from campus, so we pull in some retail work from restaurants, as well as banks, non-profits, the YMCA, churches and school associations.”

To market the services now available with the DP 100, he went around to some of the local merchants and gathered samples of printed brochures and menus. “I even stopped into a local pizza shop and said to them if you have a change in your menus and need to print 25 or 30 menus, bring those over and we can run those out for you,” he says.