Flavell Factory Tour

The Marketing Process - First of all, commercial clients usually contact us because they have an exhibition for which they need brochures or they have a new product or perhaps they have just moved premises or maybe just started a new business. Whatever the reason, I like to insist that between us we appraise exactly what they would like to achieve from this potential piece of print. We have a very high level of repeat business and it is important to me that we do not embark on expensive adventures just for the sake of artistic indulgence. Every item you need has to justify its cost with increased sales or increased efficiency or increased image and PR.

Ideas Ideas are our stock in trade - between us we turn them into tangible thoughts. You tell us what you need - we organise those needs into tangible products: an image, a design, a layout, photography, copy writing and finally rough visuals for you to choose. We then turn these into real leaflets or brochures or catalogues.

Design and Layout Once we have the visual we can work on those designs to produce a digital layout for your proof. We use industry standard graphic software such as photoshop, illustrator, freehand, quark xpress, etc on an apple mac platform and can easily import text and graphics which you may already have in PC formats such as word, publisher, jpegs, etc. Don't worry if you are not computer orientated, we are happy making hi-resolution scans from your images and converting text from other word processing programmes.

Job Specification Once you have decided on your proof, we can concentrate on the logistics of your job. How many do you need realistically. It is better to reprint a new version with current updated information than save a few pounds and have a cupboard full of useless brochures taking up space. Who is your target market? What stock do you want? Is it paper or board, folded or scored, laminated? We can help with all these potential questions.

Pre-press Lets move to the pre-press stage. When the proofs are signed off we are ready to make plates. We use quality aluminium litho plates so they do not stretch. They are capable of holding a 2%- 98% dot which means that we capture 96% of the total colour gamut on the plate. These plates have the capability of running well over 100,000 copies without any loss in quality. For quantities in excess of that we have other plates which we can use which although dearer extend the print runs towards 500,000 and more. We also store these plates for any future print run to save costly remakes for your next reprint.

Printing We use heidelberg presses, some say the ultimate in quality printing machinery. I have visited the factory in Weisloch near Heidelberg several times over my twenty seven years of printing and can confirm the research and commitment that Heidelberg persue is very reassuring.

We use single and two colour machines when you need spot colours. You can print up to 6 colours in one pass with our large machine, allowing you four process colours to give you a full colour job plus an additional house colour or gold or silver as well as a varnish. We are proud to be one of a very small community of printers in Eurpe to have this facility.

Folding Once your job is printed what then? The most common finishing process is folding which we can do up to a 200gsm board. Anything over that weight we would score first and normally supply flat. Our most popular item is an A4 sheet folded twice to form a 1/3 A4 leaflet. This style is ideal for enclosing in a DL office envelope or for standing in a promotional rack supplied by one of the tourist information distribution companies. If you require your own racks we can supply these as well.

Die cutting and Creasing If your job is too heavy to fold immediately, we will happily score it for you. We also offer a die cutting service which is especially useful for folders. We have a range of standard oversize A4 folder cutters with side flaps or upflaps or both, which can interlock or be glued to suit your application.

If you want a specific shape cutting for your promotion, just let us know what you had in mind and we can organise a cutter to that exact shape. We are also able to offer cutters for packaging, labels, boxes, in fact anything you can think of, we can probably cut and crease it for you.

Book Binding If you are producing multi-page documents we can gather your pre-folded sections together and stitch them into a finished book. We will then guillotine trim on three edges to give you a delightful job, professionally presented just ready to give out as a sales brochure or catalogue or ready to sell as a retail product.

Collating For single sheet collating such as forms or corporate calendars we have another collator. This will again give you a quality finished product produced quickly and efficiently saving you time. effort and cost.

Wire - Binding As many of you know we produce many thousands of our own notebooks during the course of a year. To this end we have the latest in automated punching and wire-o-binding. This type of finish is ideal for calendars either with a thumb cut or without. Any type of notebook is enhanced by this since the cover can turn back on itself completely making it easier to write on. We keep white and gold wire-o as standard and can access many different and unusual colours for a minimum of 5,000 copies.

Print Finishing To compliment our finishing department you can access numbering in any direction on the sheet which is ideal for forms, hole punching for insertion into ring binders, perforating, tabbing and indexing.

We are also able to string tags, glue, perfect bind, make up envelopes, laminate - just about anything that you might need either in the production of stationery products or to complete your printing project.

Wrapping and Packing We don't stop once it is finished, we have arguably the most sophisticated packing lines in central Scotland. Automatic shrink wrapping, automated feeding and cello wrapping for crystal clear bags with the integral applying of labels and euro hooks all with minimum quantities of less than 10,000 units. Just tell us what you need and I am sure we can help