Naresh Gulati has dumped the Print Bound name in a major rebrand that positions his Melbourne-based operation as a full-service business.
A commercial offset printer before Gulati’s OCA Group acquired it last year, Print Bound has been transformed to include digital, wide format, packaging, and UV capabilities, and become integrated with the creative and logistic arms of OCA.
To reflect the company’s capabilities outside of print, and promote its trade everything offering, Gulati has renamed it Rooster IMC, the name of his existing design agency.
Gulati says the name symbolises a wakeup call to the industry about a better way to do business – using trade services like his to build a client base before buying expensive equipment.
“Print Bound had the image of a printer, but we are no longer just a printer, we are a communications company that can provide anything our clients need,” he says.
[Related: More rebrands]
Since moving into the former Geon facility in Mt Waverley, Rooster IMC has installed two new offset presses, four high-end digital production printers, two wide format machines, and a new prepress setup.
The 7000sqm plant has plenty of room to grow, including space for two more offset presses on the main floor.
“We are going to start making a lot of sales now that we have finished moving and invested in a wide range of equipment,” Gulati says.
“Our point-of-sale business has tripled this financial year and we are earning higher profits from insourcing production. Volume is up 300-400 per cent across the business.”
The company also has a design team, a 65-strong IT department developing software, and the organisation to create customised database-driven marketing campaigns.
The company plans to launch its home-grown could-based Easy Print Manager in the last quarter of this year that handles the entire print process from web-to-print to MIS, workflow, ordering, customer service, and distribution.
Gulati says setting up software systems can cost printers up to $200,000 before staff and other running costs, but Easy Print Manager will be a quarter of the price due to being in the cloud.
[Related: More print companies moving house]
To complete the end-to-end service, OCA also bought finishing house The Bindery last year and recently established its own distribution business, BPO Link.
Gulati says insourcing distribution around Victoria is saving the business $200,000 a year and makes the system more reliable, confidential and better able to handle last-minute orders. DHL will continue to handle interstate delivery.
It is powered by a proprietary application that lets clients manage everything online – send orders, track deliveries and review reports of how effective their campaigns are.
Gulati says it saves clients 25 to 60 per cent of distribution costs and significantly reduces delivery times. OCA offers free warehousing to clients using its distribution services.
Setting up the big operation in less than a year did not come cheap, with Gulati saying he has sunk millions into building a service that will benefit printers and the whole industry.
He says $1.5m alone was spend ‘cleaning up and reorganising’ the site, and production did not stop even for a day as the kit was progressively moved from one site to another.
Comment below to have your say on this story.
If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.
Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter