Images Magazine Digital Edition July 2018

www.images-magazine.com 38 images JULY 2018 BRAND PROFILE “We’re starting to get more substantial orders for dye sublimation. Polyester used to be a dirty word, but now you can get polyesters that mimic silk, cotton, linen, velvet and all kinds of materials. It is cheap, it looks good and it’s a lot quicker and easier to print than onto silk or using a reactive or acid process.” Brand loyalty R A Smart has a long relationship with wide format machine manufacturer Mimaki: Ron and Magnus operated printers from the Japanese brand before Hybrid became the UK distributor. “It’s been an extremely successful brand for us,” says Alex. “In the UK there’s not necessarily been much of a high production environment compared to other countries around the world – we M acclesfield was once the biggest producer of silk in the world. It’s a fitting home, therefore, for R A Smart, which not only sells printing hardware to the textile and garment industries and produces its own screen and digital prints, but also weaves silk on-site. The silk production facility and two silk brands – Barnaby Silks and Robert Keyte Silks – are only one part of the business. R A Smart, which was founded by Ron Smart, is actually a small group of companies, and it is unusual in that it both sells machinery to the textile and garment printing industry, and produces printed textiles for clients. It is a combination that works well, explains Alex Mighall, R A Smart’s market development manager. “People really appreciate the fact that we’ve got a heritage as printers: they can trust that they’re buying the machinery from somebody who knows that machinery, who can help them with that machinery, and who can support them with it.” The machinery side of the business kicked off in 1986 when Magnus Mighall, Alex’s father, joined R A Smart. He had qualified as a lithographic printer after dropping out of his A-levels, then worked for four years in the Royal Engineers printing maps for the military before joining Ron. The company was being asked to provide bespoke, dedicated, short run textile printing equipment, and so Magnus started to manufacture specialist textile printing tables and auxiliary equipment. In 1998, as digital print began to make an impact, R A Smart is no ordinary textile printer and no run-of-the-mill machinery supplier. Images visited this industry innovator to witness how it successfully combines textile production, wide format and screen print machinery distribution, and silk weaving in its unique operation Smart thinking [L-R] Macclesfield MP David Rutley, director of print Alison Smart and founder Ron Smart the machinery section became the CAD and machinery section. “We knew it was going to have an impact on the way our customers were going to work with short run printed textiles as the traditional constraints of screen print disappeared with the onset of digital technology,” explains Magnus. The digital side has grown exponentially over the intervening years. “We operate one of the largest UK facilities for digital print,” confirms Alex. “We have three Robustelli Monna Lisa [industrial inkjet digital textile printers], four Mimaki JV5 with belt systems by Aleph, and then another three JV5s: two printing dye sub and one printing pigment. Three years ago, we didn’t have a dye sublimation printer in here, and now we’ve converted two to dye sub.