Fun Cases has put £120,000 into two automatic UV printers. They run twenty four hours a day without anybody standing over them, which cuts the manual hours right down, lifts the print quality, and gets a case printing within about three minutes of the order landing.
Each machine holds fourteen hundred blank cases at a time. Once it is loaded it gets on with it on its own. Picks the next case, lines it up, prints it, ejects it, moves on.
The clever bit is not the machines
Plenty of people can buy a printer. The difference here is what happens between somebody clicking buy and the machine starting work. Webgro built a bridge between Shopify and the printers, so an order on funcases.com turns into a print job without anybody touching it.
No exporting orders into a spreadsheet. No production queue to manage by hand. The bridge sorts out which SKU it is, which artwork to pull, and where on the bed it needs to sit.
- 1,400
- Cases loaded per machine
- 3 min
- Order to printing
- 24 hrs
- Running per day
What the team does now
Printed cases drop into outbound bins, and the packing team matches each one to its order, boxes it and sends it out. The people are on the side of the job that actually needs people, rather than feeding a machine one case at a time.
There is genuine excitement around these machines. A worthy investment that should see ROI within six months.
Michael Broadbridge, Co-founder
Why it matters
Three things move. Manual hours drop, because nothing needs babysitting overnight. Quality goes up, because a machine laying down UV is more consistent than a person doing it by hand at four in the afternoon. And throughput climbs, because printers do not get tired.
Room to grow
On the modelling, the two machines can handle three to four times the current order volume before they are anywhere near capacity. When that day comes, more units bolt onto the same bridge without rewriting any of it.
