UV LED Brings New Work, New Customers and New Revenue for Mercury Print

The growth of Mercury Print Productions has been rapid. From an 800 sq. ft.-basement in the 1970s to a sprawling production facility of around 450,000 sq. ft. today, Mercury is firmly established as a leading print and packaging producer in the North American market.

With headquarters in Rochester, New York, Mercury Print is renowned for its work in the educational field and is well-positioned within the top 100 printing companies in the United States and Canada, on Printing Impressions’ influential Top 300 register for 2023.

John Place, owner, joined Mercury and began working with his mother back in 1979. He describes those early days: “My mom actually started the business in her basement in 1969. She would go out and sell during the day and then print at night. I remember hearing the printing presses going when I was sleeping at night. So, [in] 1979 I joined the company and one of the deals was, I said, ‘Mom, we got to get out of the basement,’ so we actually left in 1979 and opened our first place. I was on the sales side; she was on the inside and we kind of grew the company probably to $20 million in sales, her and I.

Mercury Print Productions 450,000 sq. ft. headquarters and production facility in Rochester, New York.

“We had, at that point there, probably about 110 employees,” he continues. “She had retired 15 years ago, and I decided we're going to go after the educational market and grew the company to where we are now — about 250 employees in a square footage of 450,000 sq. ft., so we've grown quite a bit, doing very well actually.

“Educational is our largest part of our business,” Place says. “We specialize in that, so we're a variety — packaging, educational, and we're still in the commercial print.”

Planning to Bring UV Coating In-House

Producing a large volume of educational material means that Mercury Print has a continuous, high demand for UV coated covers. Until March 2023, the production team was having to subcontract UV coating work out to an external finisher, which affected their bottom line and their competitiveness when chasing down new business.

Joe Del Vecchio, print production manager at Mercury, explains the scenario: “There was a revenue stream that we were going after that we couldn't get our hands on because we weren't competitive enough when we weren't applying coating in line on the press. We needed to be able to print and coat at the same time, UV coat, because that's what the account base that we were going after really wanted, so we had to look at a way to do this.”

Finding the Right UV Coating Solution

The plan was to retrofit a UV curing system to one of Mercury’s two offset presses, a Heidelberg Speedmaster 102-5PL. Del Vecchio began to research this possibility and discovered GEW as part of that process. “I first heard about GEW when I started looking into LED systems,” he says. “Never had experience with LED printing or UV printing, for that matter. I was trying to see what would best fit Mercury Print and started asking questions and calling people about GEW and where in the market were they, how much of the marketplace did they have, and I felt that they were going to be our best fit.

“Once we decided we were going with GEW, they came in to measure our press out and make sure that they could put these interdeck stations in the machine properly, designing it custom to the machine, which made it go in a lot easier and a lot more effectively,” Del Vecchio continues. “When it was all done it basically looked like it was done by the factory. The installation was quick — I think it was three days of downtime, putting the system in and getting it all tied in, and on the fourth day we were testing it.”

John Place was right behind the move to install UV LED on the Heidelberg due to the high volume of UV coating work that was having to be finished externally and is enjoying the benefits of his investment. “In the educational world all the covers are UV coated, so we just saved a complete step by having LED UV-coated covers coming out in one pass and we're not bringing it to the next thing to UV coat it,” he says.

Del Vecchio agrees. “The advantage of the LED for us, in the 40-inch format, was the fact that we could produce more covers, more efficiently, versus having to go to an offline UV coater or, worst case, customers were supplying covers. We wanted the revenue of printing these covers.”

Configuring the UV LED System

The production team at Mercury worked closely with GEW on the specification of the UV LED system, to ensure that it would meet a broad range of production requirements. Tony Angelo, offset press supervisor, explains how the moveable LED lampheads allow great flexibility in their work.

The three GEW UV LED lamps can be positioned in any of the five interdeck stations, either together or individually.

“The system that we have right now on our five-color — we have three lamps and they can be stationed anywhere in between the units one through five," he says. "So that option also being a perfecting press, meaning I can print three over two, we can use the lamps in any station we want where we feel that we need to cure the ink prior to flipping it, or we can run multiple stations wet trapping into curing and then going into another coating system. So the versatility allows you to get different effects; it's a great versatility to have. Also, from an operator standpoint, it increases the confidence that you're going to have a better quality job.”

Faster, Cleaner Production

In addition to the adaptable configuration of the GEW LeoLED system, Del Vecchio highlights the effect it has had on day-to-day production efficiency. “You can run higher speeds, the machines are maintained better because they're not getting all the spray powder and stuff,” he says. “We're able to take it off the press and get it into a binder, cutting, whatever facet they need to do, within hours. Everything that we've expected out of the system has been great — it's very user-friendly, the operators love it because it is simplistic, there's not a lot of things to adjust, it's pretty much go. There's no time waiting for it to warm up, there's no time making sure that it cools down properly.”

New Materials, New Business, New Revenue

Having the UV curing capability has also enabled Mercury to confidently print on plastics and other substrates that are traditionally considered to be difficult to work with, and in turn, to gain new business.

“We are much more comfortable running various substrates, we don't have to worry about if it's going to set off in the delivery, if we're going to have blocking or anything like that,” Del Vecchio explains. “It's really made the operators enjoy running the press a lot more, with a lot less risk, because everything is cured before it hits the delivery.

“It is something that you can't put a price on, it just gives us a comfort zone that we didn't have,” he continues. “There was a lot of different types of work that we didn't want to run because of the risk, the high risk, running conventional inks on plastic substrates. There's so much cost in the material that you're printing on that you don't want to take the risk. With the LED UV it makes you more comfortable entering those markets.

“It's giving us new revenue, new sectors that we can go into. We're getting into spot coating, we're making Cyrel plates that allow us to do textured coatings and different spot coatings that we would never do before,” Del Vecchio says. “We're not sending it to an outside vendor, we're doing it in-house now.”

Angelo mirrors this view: “I think your confidence level is a lot higher printing on an expensive material; we also print on plastic now, a type of Tyvek material which is a woven plastic, and the UV is nice because, again, I don't have to use those drier inks, which are very problematic, whereas they're coming off ready to ship to the vendor — that's revenue for us, you know, time is money.”

Return on Investment for UV LED Installation

During the procurement process for the UV system, the projected return-on-investment period was duly considered and the case was clearly in favor of bringing the UV finishing work in-house. As Place explains: “We did an ROI on the UV coater on the five-color and it was less than a year and a half payback. It's meeting our expectations and what we projected that we were going to do based on the amount of covers and UV coating inline. It was like a no-brainer for us.”

He concludes: “It's performing well — we've never had a UV press before, so this is first for us, but it's fantastic, it really is.”

To learn more about LeoLED2, GEW’s water-cooled UV LED curing system for the most demanding applications, click here.