Inkjet & Digital Printing

Action Mailers lowers paper costs, delivers increased print quality via its Ricoh alliance

Thursday 20. February 2020 - Direct mail production house grows inkjet footprint with RICOH Pro VC60000 with Extended Gamut Inks, delivering more applications with offset-coated papers and driving efficiencies.

Ricoh USA Inc. announced Action Mailers, a leading direct mail production house, has expanded its alliance with Ricoh to add more media flexibility, new efficiencies and improved image quality. Action Mailers saw a strategic opportunity to lower paper costs while increasing print quality with the award-winning RICOH Pro VC60000 with Expanded Gamut Inks. With Expanded Gamut Inks, the company can now print directly to offset-coated papers, with no pretreatment. As a direct mail company that prints nearly one third of its jobs on offset coated stocks, this adds significant efficiencies and flexibility to its shop. This news expands the current alliance between Action Mailers and Ricoh, which includes their early deployments of several of Ricoh’s InfoPrint 5000 and RICOH ProcessDirector for workflow management.
“Our customers are always looking for ways to cut through the noise and deliver their messages directly to their audience. Image quality and paper choice make all the difference,” said Marc Hoy, General Manager, Action Mailers. “The RICOH Pro VC60000 and its enhanced inks make producing applications that deliver on both fronts significantly faster and more cost-effective. Personalized print on offset coated stocks is incredibly popular, incredibly effective and, traditionally, incredibly inefficient to create. The Pro VC60000 and its inks changed all that. Now, we can produce vibrant color and targeted precision on premium papers in a single, hyper-efficient production pass.”
Established in 1972, Action Mailers has grown into a major direct mail production facility in the Philadelphia area with more than 300 employees, all while remaining family owned. The company is a full-service provider focusing on the non-profit segment and has worked closely with Ricoh over the years to continually improve its mail operations, leveraging the company’s broad portfolio and deep expertise. Decision makers cite Ricoh’s hands-on, responsive service team as a key factor in earning Action Mailers’ repeat business.
Allowing Action Mailers to leave behind preprinted shells and paper treatments empowers them to produce more jobs more quickly, while delivering incredible image quality. The RICOH Pro VC60000 provides a function-rich, comprehensive solution for customers looking to expand their digital, inkjet or color capabilities. Ricoh’s new Expanded Gamut inkjet technology rivals the output of offset inks with its media versatility and compatibility with gloss-coated stocks. These inks are designed to make the entire production system more versatile and economical – and less complicated. In addition to a significant boost in color gamut, these inks enable print operators to print faster on a wider variety of media, including standard offset coated and uncoated papers, all with improved make-ready times.
The Ricoh-patented printheads and inks, which leverage dynamic variable drop technology, are capable of producing offset-replaceable print quality with physical resolutions of up to 1200 x 1200 dpi. It supports a wide range of fluid types, paper stocks and file formats, including PDF, PDFVT, JDF/JMF, PostScript and AFP/IPDS. With its modular architecture, the RICOH Pro VC60000 is highly configurable to meet users’ unique needs, and highly scalable to grow with rapidly evolving companies like Action Mailers.
“Alliances like the one we have with Action Mailers are absolutely invaluable,” said Mike Herold, Director, Global Marketing, Inkjet Solutions, Commercial Printing Business Group, Ricoh. “By being in constant collaboration with customers like Action Mailers as they face and adapt to new challenges over time, we get a much clearer picture of how the industry is changing – and how that’s affecting our customers. That information goes directly into our R&D process. Close customer relationships like these empower us to build the future of print together.”