St Albans - Colouration has installed a Zünd digital cutting table at its south-west London print house, where it is now proving invaluable in the run-up to Christmas and beyond.

A specialist in the beauty and fragrance retail market, Colouration supplies a wide range of printed materials to the high street. It offers conventional and digital printing, large-format graphics, outdoor signage and more, all with the USP of attention to colour accuracy.

Running a total of nine printing systems of various technologies including Canon printers, Colouration looked to increase its finishing department – which had already included a Zünd table – to manage overflow. The new Zünd G3 2XL3200, supplied by Canon, can clear bottlenecks from both Colouration's existing router machine, running MDF and acrylic, and its knife cutting machine on corrugated board. It can process a wide range of materials, from plastic and metal through to textiles.

Colouration purchased the system following a visit to Zünd UK Ltd's showroom in St Albans, while the exact configuration was decided at a second viewing at FESPA 2017 in Hamburg. Thanks to the modular construction of Zünd's Swiss-made systems, the Zünd G3, S3 and D3 cutters are all available in a variety of sizes with a choice of material handling systems, modules and tools that can be installed on delivery or retrofitted at a later date.

Colouration's new Zünd G3 2XL3200 features a tandem vacuum system: two vacuum plates on the working area that can be operated independently of each other, enabling the cutter to work on one side while material is fed onto the other to save downtime and boost productivity. It is also fitted with Zünd's Automatic Router Bit Changer (ARC), which changes router bits without user intervention to accelerate production further.

"It's a great machine – faster than the older machine, versatile and clean working," comments Managing Director Tony Dennington, who founded Colouration in London SW17 in 2001. "It does everything they said it would."

He continues: "Cutting work has become bigger than anyone thought. In the early years we were asking if you could justify buying a cutting machine when you compared it with someone with a ruler, but technology has advanced so much that you now have the speed and accuracy on any size, any shape and any material. It has become a necessity to our business."

Colouration started as a traditional printer, but moved more into large-format and manufacturing due to a changing market. Tony Dennington explains: "There was a decline in demand for traditional printing due to the internet and digital printing. We needed to diversify to move forward – and to maintain high standards across the board."

Now most of the valuable pre-Christmas retail work has been completed, Colouration is looking towards 2018, potentially adding extra shifts to cope with the output. Investment in additional printing equipment may also be on the cards.