This month sees the installation of new machinery for Guardian to enhance our client offering.

So far in 2010, Guardian Direct Marketing have made three significant investments to ensure their key mission statement of “Never being satisfied until the customer is” can be maintained.
“In today’s competitive market, providing a one stop service has become critical to our proposition”, said Matthew Caldwell-Nichols, MD. “Supporting direct marketing with telemarketing was a key operational need and the acquisition of telemarketing business OpenDoor Telemarketing solved that. It has increased the existing capacity to twelve telemarketing seats, as well as bringing in new call management software to improve reporting”.

To improve turnaround times and improve the handling of personalised mailings requiring complex finishing, Guardian acquired the business of well known print finishers, Folding Services, in order to provide facilities for mailing one piece mailers and to offer clients an all in one service once their mailers are printed. The MBO folders, Polar Guillotine and Muller Martini stitcher machinery will be relocated to Guardian’s mailing fulfilment site in Bury St Edmunds, once expansion of the site is completed at year end.

Other new additions to the plant list include the latest in inkjet technology with the twin head VideoJet printer. The printer uses solvent based inks allowing print on most surfaces and is similar to HP inkjet heads, located in both Guardian’s Suffolk and Cambridgeshire locations, in that it will print in mono up to 2 inches wide in high quality, including logos and PPI’s. It is also capable of high quality addressing on-line on paper enclosing lines. Printing onto white band film used for monthly publication mailings has reduced set-up time, preventing film change and enabled significant postage savings by producing hybrid postal service mail using the data file. In a further development Guardian has also added extra production space at their second site in St Ives, Huntingdon, with the attainment of an additional unit to accommodate the increasing workload from new clients and from those clients simply wanting us to do more for them.