CartridgesDirect on the commercials of consumables

We speak with Simon Williams, managing director of CartridgesDirect.

What printing brands and attached services do you specialise in?

We sell all of the major brands of original printer and copier cartridges. With a tight focus on the SOHO to SMB markets, we are particularly strong with Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark, Kyocera, Samsung and Fuji Xerox.

When did your company first get involved in this area?

CartridgesDirect is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. We opened our first website back when e-commerce was still a very young industry.

What are your credentials in this area?

We offered OEM-only products in 2008, so we actively sought partnerships with OEMs. We are Brother, Epson and Samsung resellers, Lexmark Silver Partners and an HP Gold Partner. We won HP Supplies Partner of the year and HP Asia Pacific Outstanding Online Partner in 2015.

Heard about any cool developments recently?

The most exciting development for some time is HP PageWide. There is a strong focus on it for good reason. When I started the benchmark would have been 8ppm. With this new technology we’re looking at 70ppm+ with no moving parts! We’ll see significant growth in this sector.

Can you tell us about a recent deployment you have done?

Being supplies-focused, we don't often have the opportunity to deploy hardware. We will get involved and recommend where necessary. Ultimately though we tend to offer unbiased hardware advice from a supplies perspective, ie what will achieve cheapest cost of print.

What’s driving customers' print projects?

Technology has moved on significantly and so has the printer. Wi-fi allows it to be accessed from a wider range of devices. Connectivity and remote printing via the internet, USBs, SD cards and many other sources needs to be supplemented by higher print speeds and diversity of output. This is why speeds such as 70ppm and multifunction capability are found on mid-range and even low-end printers.

Printing is...?

Printing is the very heart of communications, needing longevity and portability.