Miamisburg, OH (USA) – Allcraft Print & Graphics has found significant quality improvement—and success—with Esko DeskPack and an Esko CDI 2530 digital flexo plate imager with Esko HD Flexo.

Located in Mississauga, Ontario, Allcraft Print & Graphics is a family-owned manufacturer and supplier of pressure sensitive labels (sheets and rolls) and tags for consumer goods and manufacturing (electronics components). After founding his print business, Mark Pothiah was joined by his brother, Andrew, to develop graphics services for the company. Their father, Chris Pothiah, a veteran of flexo printing, serves as a sales executive for the company. 

Allcraft specializes in one- to eight-color narrow web flexographic printing. As a trade shop for other printers, their services include bar code generation, trapping, distortion, step & repeat, film output, and digital flexo printing plates. 

“There are very few companies our size that have everything: presses, full prepress services—the whole thing,” comments Mark Pothiah, Allcraft owner.  “However, we stress that we do everything at the highest quality possible.”

Until recently, the company had been performing many of its prepress tasks manually. As their workload increased, they realized that they either had to hire new help, or find a way of doing the work automatically. “We decided to purchase Esko DeskPack to stay extremely efficient, so we wouldn’t let our customers down,” recalls Pothiah. 

Esko DeskPack also allows Allcraft to be more consistent. “With an automatic system, there is no human error, which is always dangerous in our business,” says Pothiah. “Also, with DeskPack, it takes only a couple of minutes to complete work that used to take an hour. We complete jobs faster, and it lets us take on more work.”

“When we realized that we could to do better work with digital plates than our analog plates, we sent our plate work out to another company. Unfortunately, they were not using an Esko digital flexo imaging system. The results were okay, but we were spending too much money outside, and were not able to utilize the press as well as we’d like. We knew we’d be better off producing plates in-house. Four months after we purchased DeskPack, we invested in an Esko CDI 2530 with Esko HD Flexo.

“With Esko HD Flexo, we’re producing much better work. The entire image is sharper. The highlights are phenomenal. In fact, we’re getting business from other printers to make their plates, because they cannot similar quality plates elsewhere. We’re also getting much more new business. Our sample work sells itself.”

“We have always believed that we would produce a job right, or not it all. So, in the past, there were jobs we were unwilling to do. With the help of Esko, we now run the highest quality work in the area. With Esko HD Flexo, we’ve been able to diversify our offerings tremendously.  It’s been a big difference.”