palamides GmbH - History

Palamides the finisher

Palamides Ltd in Renningen was established in 1970 by Helga and Sesto Palamides. The small commercial bookbinding company, located at that time in Stuttgart, started with one guillotine and one folding machine. At that time, the product range consisted mainly of small to medium runs of advertising printed matter and leaflets. Since the beginning of the 1980's, runs of 100,000 up to millions are processed. Aldo Palamides, who is Managing Director of the finishing side, joined the company, and since 1980, began the entry into mailing processing. Palamides was one of the first bookbinders in the region to begin with hotmelt glueing in the folding machine. Today in the hall at Renningen, which was significantly expanded again in 2002, there are seven folding machines, a few mailing units, two saddle stitchers as well as a guillotine line.

Our first machine

An idea was created and the BA 66 was developed through concentrated work together with a renowned design office. The most important factor during this stage was always to optimise user friendliness and to guarantee an uninterrupted production flow (design through practical experience).

This machine was further developed in our processing department and, after several months of intensive revision work, was put into full scale production.

MBO, the folding machine manufacturer from Oppenweiler, undertook global sales and distribution of the machine. However, it soon became obvious that the sales work was very time consuming. Palamides painted all machines built up until then in "MBO blue".

Our own sales and distribution

In 1997 palamides decided to take sales and distribution into their own hands. The pale grey BA700 Bundling Delivery replaced the blue BA66 Bundling Delivery. In addition to this, the company was split into Palamides Finishing Ltd and palamides Ltd - the machine construction company. Aldo Palamides became Managing Director of paper processing and his younger brother Stefano took on the business management of the machine construction side.

In 1999 the machine was then renamed "automatic delivery". In addition to this, the BA900 came onto the market with a working width of 96 cm and 4 up work.

At Drupa 2000, palamides had their own exhibition entry for the first time and this turned out to be a resounding success. With 20 machines sold, the order books were full. Also at this Drupa, the first alpha800 and the beta offset delivery were introduced.

palamides' second appearance at Drupa was just as successful as the first. For the first time the new automatic deliveries were presented: the delta502, the delta703 and the delta705.

Today, there are more than 50 employees at palamides.

Since then, palamides has installed more than 700 machines and is represented in over 20 countries.

How it all began.....

The idea for an automatic delivery arose, as always, out of necessity. At the Palamides Paper Processing Plant, the folding machines and saddle stitchers could often only run at reduced capacity because of the bottleneck at the "delivery". In addition to this, for some jobs there were one, two or sometimes three members of staff at the delivery behind a folding machine or saddle stitcher. Low operational performance and high personnel costs at the machine means higher costs for each job. The costs decide whether a job can be taken on or not. In order to improve this situation, the idea for automating the delivery was born.