Today started off as most Thursdays do. I woke up with my usual Mogwai like aversion to bright light, coughed up the best part of a lung, and considered giving up smoking for the fourth time this week. After finishing my breakfast, consisting of a cup of tea and a fag, I had a shower and suddenly remembered……..today is my blog day and I have no idea what to write!
I know nothing about these things, and even the word “blog” sounded like something my sons might use as an alternative to swearing. Visions of the little men spouting such gems as “Blogging hell!”, “What the blog?” or “Daddy? I’m sorry, I’ve just blogged myself.”, did make me chuckle, but also made me realise I needed to stop thinking like an 8 year old, and get inspired.
Wikipedia describes the word blog, as a portmanteau of the term “web log”……….hmmmmmm………..to be honest the word portmanteau drew a close to that avenue of inspiration.
So I’ve decided to write a weekly review on some of the products I think your customers might like, and will hopefully make you a few quid at the same time.
First off is the Fellowes Voyager A3 Laminator.
Now this laminator is far from cheap, it retails for around £840.00, but with good reason, which I will get to later. At the moment you not only get a free Fellowes Powertrim Electric Trimmer along with it, which itself is worth £514.99 at retail, but your customer can claim £50.00 worth of gift vouchers as well.
On with the review…..
We were told that the Fellowes Voyager is 100% jam proof. A bold statement we thought, so as any decent sales team would, we thought it only right to treat it as well as Ashley Cole treats his women, and essentially try to break it! But in the same way as the aforementioned Mr. Cole, we failed miserably.
This has a lot to do with Fellowes’ unique belt driven system, which ensures that the pouches never come into contact with the rollers, leaving it impossible for them to get caught up. It also has sensors at the opening of the machine which detect the thickness of the paper and pouch combined, and automatically adjusts the motor for optimum lamination speed. I didn’t see any major benefit in this at first, but after we all had a play around with it, I realised just how much of a breakthrough it actually was.
There we all stood, armed with our variety of different sizes and thicknesses of pouches, prepared to wait for our turn at the machine. We knew it might take a while after testing a different laminator last week, and were looking forward to the break. But then, in no time at all, we were finished, done and dusted, and had to go back to doing proper work. Gutted!
The reason for this was that we didn’t have to wait for the machine to cool down or heat up again and again. Once it had heated up for the first time, it just accepted pouch after pouch after pouch, 80 micron, then 250 micron, back to 125 micron and so on, giving the same perfect results every time.
This, for me, is by far the main justification of the price. A task that would normally take around an hour, took us roughly 10 minutes. Apply this to a busy office or school, where many different people laminate many different things throughout the day, and the productivity savings become massive.
This, coupled with Voyager’s many other features, including HeatGuard Technology, a Sleep Mode and even a “clean me” feature, make it a definite no-brainer of an investment for anywhere that does a lot of laminating.
I’m off now to treat my lungs to some nicotine, which will no doubt feel like I’m inhaling a hedgehog, but with the will power of Tiger Woods, at 2am in a 6th Form girls dormitory, I’ll just have to’ blogging well’ put up with it! Thanks for reading.
Phill
Who would not want a Voyager A3 after that!