Conran Shop

BACKGROUND

It was in 1956 that the Conran group was founded initially as a furniture design group; over the past 35 years they have grown into one of the largest design consultancies in Europe. Going from Terence Conran’s first shop which was opened in 1964 in Fulham Road to ten international stores all over the world located in London, Paris, New York and Tokyo. Followed by 30 successful Conran restaurants, again established all over the world.

SOLUTION

In June 2005 Panasonic installed a Workio colour multi-function product for evaluation by the buying office. Conran shop’s buying office proved to be an ideal test for the unit as the work produced covered a huge variety of both creative and day to day office work. The team at Conran offered their opinions of the models ease of use and quality of output.

Hus Mozaffar, Group Buyer for Conran, raves about the Panasonic’s advantages and the benefits they have now gained in their offices, including an increase in productivity due to the ease and efficiency of the product. An extensive amount of work produced by this new colour device was for creating a new magazine called ‘Live It’. This magazine is packed full of beautiful products, ideas, recipes and news features making sure that readers are up-to-date with all that Conran Shops have to offer. With the Panasonic Workio’s remarkable colour quality, Conran have produced a magazine in-house which will go worldwide and will circulate to around 100,000 readers. The full colour screen meant everyone could get the most from the machine from day one.

Delivering speed to the creative process

Compared to their last colour copier Hus describes the main differences as speed and colour quality, with a fantastic warm up speed of only 15 seconds it makes it perfect for producing colour palettes and their ‘Look Book’ brochure. The ‘Look Book’ brochure is their form of communication with journalists, which in the past has always been difficult. Journalists need images of an extremely high quality, which the ‘Look Book’ managed to provide; otherwise the message will fail to be effective. This proved to be another success for the Workio, giving Conran Shops improved visual communication with added impact due to the products extraordinary colour quality.

High demand against tight time scales

In three months the Conran buying team produced over 18,000 colour prints. With only around 25 employees using the unit it just shows how useful the product was to them and how extensively the Panasonic became part of the team. The Colour Workio produced over 70% of its work as print output, surprisingly the average page coverage was only 17% for colour prints reflecting the overall type of work produced by the buying office. The Conran Group loved the Panasonic colour Workio so much they are now keen to look at purchasing a second unit in order to maintain their high level of work. They found the product easy to use and reliable, therefore increasing their productivity and improving the speed of turnaround for critical time-sensitive projects. The Conran team were able to use a number of the colour Workio’s unique features, such as printing directly from SD cards because of its ease of use.

“Speed is the most important thing to us. It has changed our way of working as it has saved us a lot of time.The colour quality was also fantastic enabling us to produce product samples for Terrance.Everyone thinks it’s great.” said Hus.