CK Rewind – April Edition

Introducing CK Rewind

As we finally start to settle into our new brand and vision, March and April have been months of innovation and investments into our service offering and our local community. From trips to Switzerland for the Hunkeler Innovation Day to Easter quizzes and one too many chocolate eggs! Let’s rewind on the last 8 weeks here at CK as we introduce to you our new monthly blog CK Rewind…

Investments & Business Activity

March kicked off on a high as our CEO, Tim, and Head of Digital & Systems Development, Paul, travelled to Switzerland to visit the Hunkeler Innovation Day where they met with our partners at Canon and received the certificate of purchase for our new Print Room overhaul! In support of the business rebrand and to help ensure we remain well positioned to Deliver Excellence we were excited to announce our £12 million investment partnership with Canon. The investment included the purchase of 2 Colorstream 8160’s continuous inkjets, Hunkeler finishing equipment and an iX 2100 sheetfed inkjet press, all of which are now fully operational on our site. The shift towards litho print quality allows us to offer a one stop shop for direct marketing products, and in combination with our digital solutions we can deliver truly personalised, relevant, and engaging campaigns through both physical and digital channels, with quick time to market.

Our print room overhaul increased our capabilities and put us on track to be the number one choice for innovative customer communications, so we decided to make things a bit more personal! Introducing Thea, our iX inkjet press, and Hercules & Archimedes, our Colorstream continuous lines – all inspired by Greek gods of colour, vision, strength, and innovation. Our marketing grad, Jaime worked with our brand partners Besley and Copp to create some bespoke designs for skins for the printers.

We didn’t stop there, next we invested in a new Epic envelope enclosing machine, also known as M.E.L to us, our Inflight Messenger (Messaging Envelope Line) which creates dynamic colour bursts and graphics, with personalised messages resulting in a high visual impact, response targeting and postal savings. M.E.L takes your marketing campaigns to the next level, engaging the customer before they even open the mailing.

As our capabilities began to increase, we realised there was room for growth in other areas of the business, including a new business unit named Managed Services – this new service inevitably introduced a scope of new roles that we are in the process of recruiting for now! Roles include Scanning, PC Provisioning, Data Entry, Junior Developer, Hand Fulfilment and so many more. You can find more information on our new service and roles available on our social media pages.

Easter crept up quick this year but as always, our marketing and customer service team were on the ball and planned and executed an interactive Easter campaign for our existing and prospective customers. The campaign aimed to showcase CK’s new and improved capabilities, whilst including lots of chocolate of course! We provided fully personalised, high-quality booklets printed on our iX Thea with gamification and a QR code to interact with our customers – the QR code took the customers to a virtual quiz, followed by a scratch, and win game (innovative gamification). We also created a collection of supporting materials, a personalised envelope on our M.E.L, thank you cards and personalised jiffy bags (that were filled with chocolate for taking part) with our own graphics designed in house by our Marketing Grad Jaime! Saving the best element until last, the giant Cadbury’s hampers given out to our daily winners of the quiz.

Supporting our Local Community & Colleagues

Here at CK we pride ourselves on supporting our colleagues and our local community, we partnered up with Project Choice who are a local organisation who work towards helping young adults with learning difficulties gain work experience. As a result of the partnership, we welcomed Callum to the team, Callum joined us on a supported internship which is a work-based study programme that can help kickstart a young person’s career or put them on the path to employment. Callum is primarily with us for a 12-week internship programme, which he has settled in brilliantly to, his confidence and independence skills have improved hugely, and we can’t wait to see his continues development over the coming weeks.

We are working towards our Better Health at Work Award and our first campaign of the year was a success, with the focus on Healthy Hearts, we created several interactive activities including a raffle, a scavenger hunt, and a health heart quiz to engage and educate our employees on the importance of looking after our heart health. We then provided ‘healthy’ prizes which included a healthy food and drink hamper, a workshop yoga class and discounted fitness classes. Watch our socials for our next health campaign in the next month or so!

Supporting our colleagues and their personal development is paramount in our business strategy, we have several colleagues completing apprenticeships and other courses along side their job roles.  Jaime, our Marketing Grad, is currently completing her Level 4 Marketing Executive Apprenticeship with Cambridge Marketing College, she caught up with PrintWeek, who recognised her as a ‘rising star’ in the industry, to discuss all things marketing, the print industry, and her career aspirations. You can read the full Q&A here – https://www.printweek.com/features/article/rising-star-jaime-havery-marketing-graduate-customerknect

Our Head of Customer Services, Cath also got behind the mic for a Q&A, this time with The Strategic Mailing Partnership for their monthly members corner piece where she discussed her 30+ years’ experience in the industry and her secret talents and hobbies. Read the full feature here – https://lnkd.in/e5VX3ffN

We finally jumped onto the podcast band wagon as our Finance & Commercial Director, Neil, met up with Jacky Hobson at Up Marketing to record an episode for the Canon ‘Print Matters’ podcast – he discusses our recent rebrand, his role at CK and our plans for the future, this will be released very soon so look out for our socials!

Towards the end of April, our colleague Sian, from our parent company Saga, participated in the Manchester Marathon, in remembrance of her nephew. CK was proud to be Sian’s official sponsor for the run, where she raised almost £3,000 for the charity Clockwork which helps young adults with mental health problems. It was great to connect with our Saga family and show our support for such a brilliant cause.

The last couple of months have been a busy and exciting time for CK as we continue to develop our capabilities and connect with our local community to deliver excellence! Stay tuned for our next CK rewind edition as we enter the next stage in our rebrand process, welcoming new people and skills to the team and become the industry leader for customer communications … watch this space!

Written by Jaime Havery