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Textile Printing
such as the environmental footprint; energy costs have also improved due to the reduction in machines and an improved production output.
Quality and service
Today, according to Aliano, Mereton Textiles offers what cheaper overseas textile manufacturers can’t: superior quality and superior customer service.
“You can’t just say that Australia has better quality. That might be true, but you must back that up with service and reliability. If we don’t offer better quality and service, then the only thing that separates us from overseas products is price, and that soon becomes a race to the bottom.
If clients have any issues that arise, they can be handled locally – we can get on to it and do it.
“We recently had an order
from Europe. Turned out that unfortunately, there was an error that meant over two hundred metres had to be redone. Now, the minute we got the email that night, we came in early in the morning, and we had the job completed and back on a truck to the airport that same day.
“Our client was astounded – they were expecting us to say it would take a week to re-do, but we fixed it in six hours,” he says.
Aliano is adamant that he will never sacrifice the quality of his products for a cheaper price point.
“I’ve seen so many industries in this game, popping up and selling
a cheaper product – and while that product will sell, the question is, was quality sacrificed for price, and do they obtain repeat orders?”
Cheaper textile products often don’t last as long as high-quality ones, says Aliano – and given the
Left
Vibrant partnership:
Joe Aliano, Mereton Textiles (left) and Russell Cavenagh, Mutoh
Below left
Workhorses: the trio
of Mutoh VJ-1948WX
dye sublimation printers at Mereton
IT service: Fabian Aliano shows off Mereton’s business-in-a-box
fact that we are all now much more environmentally conscious, no one likes to see piles of product in landfill.
“A lot of the time if the product is inferior, it needs replacing a lot quicker. The more you replace a product, the more waste is generated for no good reason, so our mindset is fixed on quality and longevity,” he says.
Working hand in hand
According to Cavenagh, the partnership between Mutoh and Mereton hasn’t just been fruitful for Aliano – Mutoh, as well, has been able to learn from him and customers like him to improve its equipment offering.
“Joe’s been a technology partner as well. We’ve had people out from Japan listening to his suggestions about how our equipment can be enhanced. You only get that information from people who are absolutely flogging it in the field,” he says.
For his part, Aliano says that Mereton is not a company that wants to hide its findings; instead, it constantly shares information with Mutoh.
“Ultimately, while we do have a certain IP factor with what we do, I need to share that with Russell so that he can also go back to Mutoh and pass on the information.
“At the same time, Russell has been out here himself, looking for solutions to anything I have had a concern with. Mutoh actively hungers for information. ‘What can we do better? What do we need to do? What’s been your idiosyncrasies?’ That’s the difference,” says Aliano.
It’s a solid supplier-customer relationship – and an Australian success story. 21
Inset bottom right
Keeping IT in the family
Joe is not the only Aliano finding success with his own business: his son Fabian, a production manager at Mereton, has also launched an IT company to service the needs of the digital printing industry.
Born of Fabian’s own experience running the IT and all the digital printing equipment for Mereton, Aliano Technologies now offers its services for trade to other printing companies.
“Fabian offers network troubleshooting, plus computer and server building, to those that
don’t have the inhouse experience,” says Joe. “He basically started this option knowing firsthand how difficult it was to get technicians to understand the needs from a production point of view.”
According to Fabian, he’s had plenty of interest from the industry – especially in the profiling and network design services.
“Networking for printers and servers requires a lot of data to be sent back and forth due to large files and printing data. You really need a solid IT infrastructure dedicated to that network,” says Fabian.
At Mereton HQ, Fabian shows me the beating heart of the printer’s IT operations: a backup raid box with an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) that lets the business keep running even if the power isn’t.
“We’ve got our business in a box here with our raid servers, our mini print server computers, our backups, all that information in one place; we also now have true online UPS backup power that can run the servers and printers for hours.
“I’ve got UPS running the print machines, and so, if the machines go out of power, we have time
to shut down everything properly – because there’s nothing worse than having everything just stop and then the heads have parked themselves in the middle of the machines. Plus, of course, it reduces the risk of any power spikes that can really do some damage,” he says.
Fabian adds that his big advantage is that he knows the printing industry, having worked in his parents’ business for more than 10 years – a business where he continues to work still.
“Out there at the moment you will find network companies, computer companies, and printer companies, all solely devoted to their expertise; however, since I’ve had to overcome all those problems from computers, networking, and printer idiosyncrasies, it’s forced me to become all that in one,” he says.
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