Digital Printing & Other Services

Print is a broad term. Every job is different and presents its own challenge. At WDM, we’ve built a print department that can handle virtually any requirement. We have multiple forms of digital printing, including colour and mono print, four colour litho print, and high-speed inkjet print, all in house. To see what else we can do, visit the print finishing page.

The range of capabilities within our company means we can select the most cost-effective printing method for the job. It also gives us the flexibility to use another method if there are other factors to consider, such as quality or lead time.

Digital printing

A mail piece which is personalised will always outperform something generic. The more personalised you can make it, the better the results. With digital print, every mail piece can be different, and you can use this effectively to tailor your message to the recipient. For example, you could mail your entire contact list but have different offers for lapsed clients, current clients, and prospects. You could change the message depending on the average order value, and you could display a client’s favourite products or recommend related products. This means you can achieve the economies

of scale of a larger job like cheaper postage rates while still achieving better results through targeted marketing.

Find out more about digital colour print

Litho Print

Our B3 litho press is best suited for high-quality generic print. It is the ideal sheet size for short to medium run lengths, which complements our entirely cut-sheet finishing and mail fulfilment operation. We produce generic booklets and flyers, postcards to be inkjet printed, and letterheads to be laser printed with personalisation. Our press requires no chemicals, uses vegetable and water-based inks, and we only use FSC certified papers as part of our commitment to being an ECO-MAILER and our ISO 14001 certification.

Find out more about our litho print services

Laser mono print

Our suite of production laser printers is predominantly used for transactional mail, such as itemised invoices, council tax bills, rent statements, or rent increase letters. We also print direct mail pieces. This can come in the form of letters onto litho-printed letterheads and carrier sheets for poly-wrapped mail pieces, such as brochures or catalogues. In fact, for any mail piece where the personalised element is black only, it is more cost-effective to litho print the base stock in colour and then overprint in black.

Find out more about our Laser Mono Printing services

Inkjet print

If your mailpiece is generic and only needs a name and address added, then inkjet printing is the cheapest and fastest printing method. We can take a postcard, one-piece mailer, brochure, or non-window envelope and add the contact details at speeds of up to 30k per hour.

Print management

As the name suggests, Washington Direct Mail started out as a mail fulfilment provider, and that remains our core business to this day. Since we were founded in 1983, we’ve been a trusted trade supplier to lots of commercial printers. This has allowed us to build strong relationships with many businesses in a range of sectors, and we now have a network of suppliers that we can count on for any print job that we can’t produce cost effectively in house. We know the best commercial printer to produce the required quality level at a competitive price.

What makes us different

Quality

To get the best from our equipment, all of our print rooms are climate controlled to maintain a stable environment, which helps colour consistency. We store our paper in the print rooms as well, to ensure it is at the optimum temperature for printing. All printers are calibrated before every shift, keeping the systems at optimum performance levels. Also, a new alignment profile is produced before every print job to ensure the print is square on the page and aligned front to back. Output from all printers is checked constantly so that any drop off in quality is identified and rectified immediately.

Same machine backup

We strongly believe that machine downtime, which is inevitable, shouldn’t ever lead to a compromise on quality. That’s why we have more than one identical backup of each of our colour digital and laser printers. They all have four-hour call out maintenance contracts, so if a machine is down, the other machines can continue to produce at the exact same quality.

Fast turnaround

All of our printing machinery is quick, and we can produce 108k colour digital, 180k mono laser, and 144k litho A4 impressions per shift. Our bespoke MIS allows us to create new jobs and slot them into the print schedule in real time. One of our core values is flexibility, and we will always pull out all the stops to meet an urgent requirement.