Factory tours, Wembley
Come meet the people who’ll make your club
We would rather you saw the floor than took our word for it. Come to Wembley, watch work come off the press, meet the team who would handle your issues, and talk your club through with paper in your hands.
Why visit
If you are wary of print suppliers, you are right to be. Anyone can put a photograph of a press on a website, promise consistency, and then send your work somewhere cheaper. A page cannot settle that argument. A building can.
We are Apprintable: a trade printer in Wembley, London running 100+ orders a day for 2,700+ customers, out of one floor you are welcome to walk round. The tour exists because that is a claim until you have seen it, and a fact afterwards.
You cannot watch your own issues run before your club exists, but you can watch everything that will happen to them. The proof stage, the press, the per-run checks against a reference sample, the finishing, the moment a job is signed off and moves. If that all looks careful to you, it will still look careful in your twelfth issue, because it is the same floor doing it.
What you are really assessing is whether these people can do the same thing every month for years. That is a judgement worth making in person.
The machines your issues will run on
Four machines do most of the work on a mailing club run. We name them because this is a craft-literate audience that deserves to know what its work runs on, and because you can come and stand next to them.
The issues themselves
Ricoh Pro C9500 digital press
Your cards, prints and zine pages come off this one. Digital means a short run is economic (a club of a hundred is a real job here, not a favour), and it means the same file gives you the same colour next month as it did this month. Most of what a subscriber pulls out of the envelope was printed on it.
Trimming, folding, booklet work
Duplo finishing line
Print is only half a printed thing. The finishing line trims to size, folds, creases and binds booklets: the work that decides whether a zine opens properly and whether a card’s edges look considered or chewed. It sits on our floor rather than at a third party’s, which is why finishing is part of your schedule instead of a gap in it.
Stickers and cut shapes
Veloblade digital die-cutter
Die-cut stickers, cut-out shapes, anything that is not a rectangle. It cuts from a digital file rather than a bespoke steel tool, so changing a shape between issues costs you artwork time and not new tooling. Stickers are also among the lightest things you can add to an envelope, which is why so many clubs put them in every issue.
Oversize pieces and posters
Mimaki large-format printer
Posters, fold-out prints and the larger pieces that will not fit a press sheet. Oversize changes the postage maths as much as the print, so if you want a poster in an issue we spec it against the envelope from the start rather than discovering the problem at the weighing stage.
Those are the four your club’s work will touch. There is no photography on this page yet, deliberately: we would rather show you the real thing than a staged version of it.
What a visit looks like
About an hour, unhurried, in Wembley, London. Four things happen in it.
- A walk round the floor
- Presses running, finishing in progress, jobs stacked and labelled at each station. You will see other people’s work in production, which is the only honest way to judge how yours would be handled.
- The people, not a sales desk
- The press operators and the finishing team are on shift while you are here, and they are the ones who will handle your issues. You get to ask them things directly.
- The samples table
- Stocks, weights, finishes and die-cut shapes in your hands, side by side. Most creators change their mind about at least one spec decision at this table, which is exactly what it is for.
- Your club, specifically
- Then we sit down with what you are planning (the niche, the issue you have in your head, roughly how many subscribers) and talk through what a first run would actually involve.
Nobody will ask you to commit to anything on the day, and there is nothing to sign. Plenty of visits end with a sample round rather than a job, which is usually the right next step anyway.
Tours are arranged by email: there is no booking calendar on this site, and we would rather find a time that suits a working factory than have you pick a slot blind. Tell us roughly when you are free and what you are planning, and we will come back with a time. The full address is at the foot of every page.
Book a visit
Can’t get to Wembley yet?
Start with the playbook, then come and see it printed.
- Niches & the envelope
- Pricing & the real cost stack
- Scaling past 500