ImagesMagUK_July_2021

IS DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 28 images JULY 2021 Inkthreadable The past year and a half has been challenging for many print and embroidery businesses; for some decorators it was a time to take stock, for others an opportunity to accelerate change. A year ago, as the first lockdown was coming to an end, Alex Cunliffe at digital print specialist Inkthreadable described to Images how the business he runs with his wife, Amy, had seen “explosive growth”. Initially, there was confusion because of mixed messages from government but, by May, Inkthreadable was not only fully operational but storming ahead. “There were a lot of factors at play last year that helped the print-on-demand industry which Inkthreadable is a part of,” Alex explains. “People were furloughed and had more time on their hands. They were gifting to loved ones because they couldn’t go to see them. Registrations – people opening shops – saw explosive growth as well because people had time on their hands and were uncertain about That level of planning taught us a lot of lessons impressed on Alex and Amy the urgency of moving away from the company’s dependency on the garment supply chain. “Our service was 60% to 70% dependent on suppliers delivering to us consistently on time every day,” Alex recalls. “In the earliest stages of the pandemic, particularly when the distribution of clothing in the UK shut down, that could no longer happen. So we started to explore changing our business model from an operations and stock management perspective, to eliminate that supplier dependency.” A year ago, Inkthreadable had about 2,000 sq ft of storage but now it has more than 10,000 sq ft set aside for stock. “Our goal is to have zero orders received that have a dependency on an external supplier delivering to us. It’s always been a very long-term plan because from the perspective of stock management, cost of goods in processes, costs of purchase price of goods, we get a lot of benefits as we grow from holding more stock ourselves. Covid allowed us to act on that faster.” With more staff in areas such as warehousing and production, the workforce has jumped from 14 to 40 over the past 12 months. The relocation proved to be the right move in November and December when sales were two-and-a-half times higher than during the run up to the previous Christmas. It was during this period that Inkthreadable achieved another goal by running multi-shift operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to keep up with demand. The business is now back to one shift a day, but still operates seven days a week, albeit with less capacity at weekends. “This year we’re not experiencing the same Twelve months ago, we spoke to a selection of very different decorators about how the pandemic had affected their businesses. One year on, Mark Ludmon catches up with four of them their jobs. There is less job uncertainly now but people are still wanting to generate their own income, whether aside from their job or instead of it.” In May 2020, Inkthreadable was processing nearly three times more orders than its peak months of November or December in 2019, prompting it to bring forward plans to move to bigger premises. In July last year, it relocated from its 8,000 sq ft premises in Blackburn in Lancashire to a 24,000 sq ft site and then added a neighbouring unit, bringing the total space to 36,000 sq ft. This extra space allowed Inkthreadable to take on five more single-head Melco embroidery machines from Amaya Sales UK, adding to the three it already owned. “With that modular system, there are so many benefits to not having your capacity reliant on producing the same artwork 12 times at a time,” Alex points out. “With on-demand production like we do, multi-heads are not very useful at all; every item is different from the next.” The purchase of the new embroidery machines followed last year’s investment in two Kornit Avalanche HD6 machines, which joined its Kornit Storm Hexa and another Avalanche HD6. The main reason for adding the extra space was that Covid-19 Alex and Amy Cunliffe at Inkthreadable’s new, larger premises Covid-19 diaries: 2021 Inkthreadable increased its Melco embroidery machines to eight