Background
Triangle Repro is on Nassau Street, in Princeton, New Jersey, across the street from Princeton University. The company offers an array of reprographic services, from photocopying and printing, to laminating and binding. They offer a full range of binding solutions, most notably, Fastback® thermal binding. They have a Fastback® 15xs binder, a PowisPrinter®, and two Foilfast® printers.
Because of its location, Triangle Repro gets a lot of work from the students of Princeton. Most of this work requires copying and binding. Bill Howard, the CEO of Triangle Repro, estimates that 90% of the work that the company receives for the Fastback binder and Foilfast printer is from students.
Challenge
At the end of every semester, things get busy for all the print shops and copy shops in Princeton when the university students turn in their dissertations and theses for their final grades. Naturally, the better their work looks, the more it impresses the professors. The students are acutely aware of this, so the clever students are always looking for presentation packages that will improve the appearance of their work.
Triangle Repro wanted tools to help them compete with the other print shops and copy shops in the area for the student projects. The students often wanted covers on their term papers to be foil stamped, but they either couldn’t afford it or couldn’t wait the time it took to get the covers done. Bill Howard started to look for ways to offer this to the students in a print-on-demand environment. Unfortunately, most systems he looked at were expensive and antiquated. The machinery looked like something from the last century—not something you’d show off if you were selling your company as a state-of-the-art facility.
Triangle Repro also looked into the various on-demand binding systems that were available. “There was a punch-and-bind system that offered hardcases, but the results were very chintzy looking. We did not like this product at all.” And the covers still needed to be sent out to be foil printed.
Solution
Bill Howard was already familiar with the Fastback binding systems when Ray Cuzzolino of Executive Binding Systems (EBS) walked into the shop with Foilfast printed samples. “I go to a lot of conventions, and I’ve seen the Fastback binding equipment at these shows,” Bill said. “But I had never seen the Foilfast printer before.” Like most people in the printing industry, he knows how complicated and expensive it is to produce hot foil stamping. The idea that you could produce similar results on a desktop printer was a revelation.
Triangle Repro purchased two Foilfast printers to ensure that they would be able to keep up with the demand for the foil-printed covers from the students and as a safeguard in case one of the printers was out of commission. Bill Howard has been impressed with the quality of the output. Bill said. “I’m thrilled with the results.”
Bill Howard was also impressed with the quality of service the company received from Executive Binding Systems. When they had a problem with one of their Foilfast printers, EBS service manager Frank Murillo drove down from Northern New Jersey “in the middle of a snowstorm” to take care of it.
Results
Triangle Repro’s ability to keep up with the heavy demands for bound documents from the university students has kept them busy. The fact that they can offer foil printed covers in a print-on-demand environment has also been a plus for the company. “We’re having an outstanding season,” Bill said. “We’re pulling a ton of business into the shop thanks to the Foilfast printers. The students are ecstatic with the results, and the color foil printed covers go over very well with the professors.”
There is a local company that binds student projects using traditional case-bound covers with hot foil stamped titles, but each book costs the student $58, and the turnaround is 48 hours. “They are using technology that is 150 years old,” Bill noted. “Whereas we can offer the students beautiful foil printed covers and spine in less than four hours.”
Because of the huge demand placed on the traditional binderies, and the slowness of the equipment, the binderies often cannot keep up with the demand. As a result, the students are turning to Triangle Repro to get their projects done. These are jobs that Triangle Repro was not expecting, but certainly is happy to accept. “This is found money to me,” Bill said.
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