Metropol
Metropol is the largest lifestyle publication in the South Island, celebrating Christchurch and it's surrounding districts. Distributed fortnightly, the publication covers everything from lifestyle, fashion, travel, dining and much more.
Metropol began as a coldset tabloid publication, printed on white offset paper. Over the years, as they identified the need to keep evolving as a business, it was decided that they wanted to achieve more of a magazine look to widen their customer base. This was originally done by moving to a gloss substrate, but still a tabloid publication printed on our DGM heatset press (newly installed at the time). This made Metropol one of our foundation clients as Inkwise entered the heatset printing market in 1996.
Following this change, Metropol decided to pursue the idea of a true A4 sized magazine – which was something we couldn’t produce on the DGM press. We came up with a temporary method of achieving this until we installed our A4 M600 press in 2014. The M600 press was a great fit to the requirements of Metropol, offering a true A4 size, with sheetfed quality reproduction but at the high speeds of web offset printing. This allowed us to offer them the maximum editorial and advertising timeframe, while still achieving their speed to market requirements.
“For Metropol, our print partner is our most important supplier relationship. We need a partner who is flexible to work with us to ensure we can get what we require completed smoothly and easily.” Says Metropol Managing Director Murray Dempsey.
Just like Metropol, we have always understood the need to keep our business evolving – investing as required to meet the needs of our clients. As our clients grow, the team here at Inkwise pride ourselves in our ability to keep pace with them. Murray believes we look at the bigger picture. “Long term view over short term gains and trade-offs is the way we both benefit in the long run.”
The challenge
The biggest challenge to overcome was printing an A4 magazine on a press with a 578mm cut off! But with innovative thinking from our team of experts at Inkwise, we were able to find a way to achieve this until the A4 M600 press was introduced to the industry.
Our process
We worked with Metropol to achieve their growth requirements as their business needs changed and evolved. We were with them along the way making changes to our business that fit with theirs. The knock-on effect has been a fantastic relationship that has stood the test of time and continues to flourish. “Our publishing schedule doesn’t leave any margin for error so, a smooth operational relationship between us and Inkwise is critical. We need things to go without a hitch.”
