All of Mothercare’s in store marketing artwork has been produced in their in-house studio located at their UK headquarters in Watford. The MacHub were brought in by Mothercare in 2016 because they had a catastrophic data-storage failure and various 3rd party organisations failed to retrieve critical data files from their corrupted storage drives. As a result Mothercare were at risk of permanently losing the data and not being able to meet their tight print deadlines.

After successfully retrieving and repairing vital data files the MacHub replaced Mothercare’s antiquated server and backup drive with a far more sophisticated Mac OSX Server and RAID system. The MacHub continued to provide support to Mothercare’s Server and RAID set-up and studio users until November 2019 when Mothercare UK went into administration.

SMP is a market leader in Print Management services to some of Europe’s largest retailers such as Tesco, WHSmith and Foot Locker. In addition, they support several major Out of Home print clients. SMP’s busy reprographic studio provides a vital role in proofing and amending artwork for these clients and therefore runs as a 24x7.

TheMacHub were introduced to SMP in 1997 with a view to providing support to two busy and growing studios. This includes several projects to upgrade user Mac’s and all their studio infrastructure (including Mac OSX servers, RAID storage, network and switches). We have been supporting SMP ever since!

Being a large print company that supports a range of major clients, SMP use several 3rd party platforms, such as Agfa Apogee, which had to be integrated into the Apple Mac environment as many of these client apps are Windows-based. They operate a 24 hour studio production process and need this matched by support in the unfortunate event of any system failures. We worked alongside their IT support company to ensure that any outages in the system were dealt with promptly to maximise studio production uptime.

Key members of the MacHub team have supported Warner Brothers on a number of film productions such as Harry Potter and Phantom of the Opera. For these type of projects our teams have built and supplied temporary platforms to enable the collaboration, sharing and streaming of content amongst the production teams.

Given the daily production deadlines that multi-disciplinary film production teams constantly have to work to, it is critical that the platform provides users with maximum uptime. There are challenges to providing a solution and managing a platform and infrastructure to deliver this uptime in a constantly changing and challenging environment. Last minute changes are being made and there are massive fluctuations in the bandwidth required to move large video files around the various stages in the film production process, from rushes to post-production.

By making on-the-fly hardware changes and software modifications, we take care of these challenges, enabling our clients to focus on delivering their creative projects - on time and on budget!

We have been involved in the events and conferences industry for almost 30 years. This included working with Linotype Hell for 5 years in a row supporting Apple Expo in Europe and the Middle East.

At each Apple Expo event our client took a large booth and ran a number of ‘crowd-pulling’ activities including interactive demo’s and seminars run each day during the event.

Our role was to help our client to set-up and to be on hand to ensure that all demo’s, seminars and other technology (such as lighting and displays) ran smoothly throughout the event. In order to run the demo’s we had to work alongside engineers from several of our clients partners including AGFA, FUJI and Adobe and also integrate their specialist software into our Apple Mac exhibition machines and our clients ‘back-end’ print environment.

In the live event environment there are always potential challenges that have to be identified and addressed quickly - such as network outages and equipment repair on-the-fly. The key to ensuring a smooth event is to work collaboratively as one team - this is something we have been doing for over 35 years!

Historically Gillette’s Design department used to send out all their creative work to 3rd party design agencies. However, this approach led to a number of issues; it was proving too costly and it reached a point where the Design team felt that they were not getting satisfactory results back. Using agencies also created time delays and as a result, production deadlines were being missed. Gillette eventually made a decision, along with our teams support, to bring all DTP and creative art design in-house.

At this point Gillette instructed our team members to configure a technical set-up whereby all data was safe and secure. We configured a secure custom Apple Mac server and storage solution. Given the wider IT demands of Gillette’s IT department, specific systems and processes were required to ensure compliancy.

After installation, we were asked to provide support as part of a monthly contract - this was for the server and storage architecture and users Apple Mac machines. Taking this approach achieved a smooth and seamless integration - all existing users and new starters could access data easily and surely. The client had peace of mind that data was backed up on a daily basis and the studio could run itself with us in the background.

In addition, as part of our brief we also sourced permanent creative artworkers to support their production workflow. From this point on, all of Gillette’s products, packaging and adverts were created in this studio and only when Gillette were taken over by Proctor and gamble some 4 years later, did the studio cease.

Lamerton Creative is a leading brand identity agency and has a varied client base. Often these clients have bespoke demands for their projects. Considering the profile of many of Lamerton Creative’s clients security and confidentiality is a huge factor.

Consequently, we had to design a solution that would meet these needs and give Lamerton Creative a platform that is functional, fast and above all, secure. We configured and installed a set-up that includes a dedicated Apple Mac server and RAID storage infrastructure to ensure drive redundancy in the unfortunate event of a drive failure.

We also provide ongoing support to ensure that the equipment is maintained, reliable and in keeping with the massively changing demands of digital creativity such as that in the Adobe suite and other 3/4D rendering programmes.