The production floor at Pureprint runs as smoothly as the Swiss watches advertised in the catalogues and magazines that the Sussex company prints. Like the precision of the cogs, springs and wheels that ensure the hands of the expensive watch keep to time and move without obvious effort, so the flow of jobs, whether the files which arrive at 4am and must be sent out that day, whether the foil blocking on a presentation box, whether an exhibition catalogue, keeps to the same precise rhythm. The job schedules shown on display monitors proves this. The progress of jobs is reported in real time, all extracted from its Tharstern MIS. Pureprint is about data as much as it is about print.
“Live data on screens is absolutely critical,” says Pureprint managing director Richard Osborne. The displays are prominent around the business and flick between different measures – the number of jobs to be shipped that day, number of errors and so on – all about keeping staff informed and part of the whole of what is among the country’s largest commercial printers. “And the sales team get a version of this on their phones; quality control can see what the issues are. If a reprint is necessary a new job number is generated. There is no need for anyone to run around the factory,” he says.
The level of transparency is part of the company’s Smarter 22 project to improve efficiency and reduce waste across the business, and part of a rethink of its strategy in the wake of Covid-19. It is working thanks to a focus on getting it right first time and on implementation of automation. “We are producing more work with less staff now,” says chief executive Mark Handford. “It is an extension of what we had started just before Covid.”
It has around 30 fewer people than before lockdown. Next year the already successful business intends to become leaner and fitter. That comes next year with plans for a Lean 23 project with the aim of improving margins in the business.
Mark Handford is the living embodiment. He has taken on the challenge of walking thousands of steps a day, so strides not just between Crowson House, the main factory on the Uckfield industrial estate housing its three B1 Speedmaster and the building across the yard, but also to Beacon House at the other end of the industrial estate and which is now home to its digital presses.
“We are looking for growth,” he says. “It’s not simply about turnover. we want the right sort of growth. Following Covid, we have come back as a senior team with a rekindled appetite.”
While Handford walks the walk around the Uckfield operations, it is too far to reach the other operations in the £65 million group: Imprint, the large format operation in Newcastle or Pixl in Leeds.
The latter is the most recent addition to the group having been acquired in 2020 during the height of the pandemic. It is a photo studio that specialises in retail work, the images ending up online, in catalogues and especially in point of sale displays that are printed at Imprint. The group’s large format operation was itself acquired in 2014 and has become crucial to the full circle offering to customers. It works both ways. The Sussex operation is the largest client for Imprint, says its managing director Dave Bullivant.
The large format business has doubled in size since the acquisition and has enjoyed the investment to help with diversification. “It’s about matching the equipment to the market you want to be in,” he says. In 2014, 80% of revenue came from retail customers. That is now less than 50% thanks to diversification into new markets.
The acquisitions have introduced different sectors to those addressed from the Sussex operations. This has remained a sheetfed, either Heidelberg litho or HP Indigo digital over three factories. Despite the litho firepower provided by three Speedmaster XL106 presses (ten, six and four units with coaters) Pureprint handles a growing volume of web to print work, gifting, personalised children’s books and so on that are produced on the five Indigos, three B2 and two SRA3 machines. Litho accounted for 90% of sales in 2014, says Handford.
It is now generating less than 60% of the sales, but this is a greater amount than in 2014. It indicates just how important digital printing has become.
Litho is used for traditional products, high end books, magazines and sales literature, and reports & accounts which will still need to be passed on press. A series of customer rooms with viewing booths make this as comfortable as possible without some of the features that such facilities had 30 or so years ago. It is professional to a tee.
The company is now comfortably the largest producer of reports & accounts in the UK thanks to the loss of competitors including Taylor Bloxham and CPI Colour. Taylor Bloxham also provided the 12-station 19-clamp Muller Martini Alegro binder that was almost new when the Leicester company closed. Other B1 print businesses that different parts of the Pureprint business have also fallen by the wayside at different times. There is strength in diversity that Pureprint has.
The quality work has also attracted a lot of overseas interest and export work. Before Covid hit, Pureprint had made the list of fastest growing exporting companies in one of those lists that business publishers love. At that time, 18% of turnover was coming from overseas customers.
This dropped off during the lockdowns when it was not expedient to fly in from New York for a press pass. It created the means for a remote press pass. Customers are now coming back for to pass in person and export work is now recovering.
The lockdown experience was well timed for Pureprint thanks to the diversity of the business and activities across the span of sectors.
Reports & accounts projects were booked in for printing in the weeks after the end of March. After that came orders from retailers and the limited reopening of shops, with safe signage, then a boost to work that goes through the post, either direct mail or gifting products. The swing to online retail sparked an unexpected demand for Pixl. This business is about creating the visual assets that end up in printed advertising, in point of sale material, in catalogues and on websites, either as still images or as video. Online is hungry for content as this needs to be refreshed more frequently than a seasonal print catalogue. “Pixl has taken off,” Handford says.
The quiet period “gave us the time to to come with a new strategy for the business.”
It has meant a physical reorganisation of the business. The production floor at Crowson House used to be presses and paper only. Now there are three folders and guillotines close to the presses and the company can print, cut stitch and bind under one roof. “I think we are using space in a pretty effective way,” says Osborne. A production office, along with space for some handwork, is on a mezzanine floor giving a view across the production floor.
The range of products passing through are delivered to the same standards regardless of the end customer, and from direct mail, magazines, books, packaging and promotional material, there are many.
“The diversity and flexibility of the business has certainly helped,” says Handford. “We are like a lot of small businesses operating within a larger business. People here are working together but in different sectors.” This gives any sales person from one sector a much greater spread of services to cross sell. Increasingly this services are branded with the group name. This PureMail is its direct mail offering with sustainability to the fore. The print, the mailing and distribution can be offset so qualifying for a Carbon Neutral statement.
Pureprint remains committed to sustainability, though some of the fundamental policies of Beacon Press have necessarily been tempered by the size of the Pureprint business. It has most recently joined EcoVadis which has awarded the company a bronze rating for its first year. There will be improvement. “We had looked at BCorps at the suggestion of a couple of our staff, but that is more suited to a smaller or start up company. We have had a couple of print managers pushing for EcoVadis so chose that,” says Handford. “More and more customers are asking about it now.”
Pureprint+ is a campaign management offering that sources the products that the company cannot produce in house. It is about convenience for the procurement departments.
The latest expansion is into transactional mailing. A Quadient mailing line is the visible manifestation, but the real work is the software hidden beneath the hood. One of the first clients is a utilities company that has 300 invoice templates and 3,000 other variables. Writing and proving the software for this took a year for the team of 16 developers Pureprint has.
The result is a big benefit for the client. The job now takes 45 minutes to run rather than the 24 hours previously thanks to the use of an automatic composition engine and rules which match the end customer with the right style of invoice. It means the letters are sent out sooner with the result that cash comes into the business that much faster.
Pureprint has also introduced software for suppressing files and cleaning the data, reducing waste, on the way to the the composition engine and delivery of files to the digital presses.
A PureShip application then integrates with a courier company filling in all details that are needed through further rules based automation. It saves five minutes a shipment and if Pureprint is handling 40,000 shipments, the cumulative effect is vast. If multiple couriers are allowed, the software will select the most appropriate for that package.
The development team is something of a secret sauce for the business, but something needed as data increasingly dictates what is printed. The Wonderbly series of personalised children’s books, which started with Lost My Name, are all about data triggering different content and creating unique pages on the fly. It is also crucial to another key customer Mixtiles.
Mixtiles is an Israel start up that supplies framed photos so that they can be arranged and rearranged on a display wall at home. It has six printer partners in the US and one in Germany, but in 2020 had none in the UK. Its criteria included a company with two B2 Indigos. The discussions took place entirely online. “We were onboarding them a year before we met anyone from Israel,” says Handford.
The files for that day’s production are downloaded from the Mixtiles servers at 4am each day. Each job is given a unique identification and a cover sheet to track the separate images through printing and cutting and then delivery to the unit where the photos are set into the frames and the jobs boxed and labelled for shipping. The daily pick up is at 4pm. Pureprint handles around 30,000 images a day, building towards the end of the year.
Running the job requires flexibility in gearing up with temporary staff. Those that show the right attitude can be invited to join a three- or six-month training programme perhaps leading to a full time job.
The company is also keener to bring in a slightly older recruit than to focus on school or college leavers. Osborne says: “There is a world of difference in attitude between a 31-year-old and a 20-year-old. If they have the right attitude, we can provide the opportunities to learn. We have staff in client services and youngsters in the factory that have come to us in this way.”
The Mixtiles are assembled in a factory which used to house the litho presses. It is now given over to storage, a hot foiling platen and Sakurai screen machine. Value added work has become a key part of what is offered. In the digital plant this means case binding and digital foiling. At the other end of the scale in Crowson House it is about section sewing and rigid box making. “More complex finishing is a growing part of the business,” he adds.
This has become another lockdown project, using a Kongsberg table to cut out the shapes for lidded and presentation boxes. “We are entirely self taught,” says Osborne. It starts with a design, validated on a Kasemake cutting plotter, followed by client sign off and production of a limited number of boxes.
The majority of customers had previously sourced these from China, disrupted by lockdowns and supply chain turmoil that followed.
There are boxes that Pureprint has designed and produced for the National Basketball Association in the US, the English Cricket Board and latterly for the English FA to present to the England World Cup squad. There are also boxes (and strong paper carrier bags) for a range of luxury brands. “The luxury goods market has come back faster after Covid,” says Handford.
A presentation box for a leading premier league football club is a case in point. The club wanted to select only key supporters for the offer with Pureprint creating the marketing message, the personalised landing page and the presentation box for the limited edition book that it had printed.
If this is at the top end of the gifting market, there are plenty of less exclusive clients.
The company reckons to have 80 customers using SiteFlow, the copy of one workflow that that tracks the order through the production steps and then combines the elements of that order in a nest of pigeon holes until all elements are present and the job can be packed, labelled and picked up for distribution. Connection to Pureprint can be through a direct API or for clients that lack that level of automation, there is an indirect API.
“Covid led to a big lift in online sales and gifting and that has continued. We can offer both direct and indirect API connections, where the client doesn’t have that capacity. It’s more than just receiving orders,” Handford says.
These orders are printed digitally, coming from a mix of outside customers which use Pureprint for production and from the YouLovePrint online business that is a fast growing part of the group. YouLovePrint is the biggest digital customer for Uckfield says Osborne, and fifth largest overall.
Like the flow of work from Imprint, this is an example of how the group gels, its separate areas of expertise feeding in and filling the production capacity that exists. And as demand changes Pureprint will invest.
There is already copious amount of automated work going through the Indigos, mixed sheets of leaflets, booklet sections. The digital factory has its own mix of booklet makers, BQ470 perfect binding online to trimming, case making and case binding from Schmedt, Kisun flatbed binding.
The operation runs around the clock, with loadings especially high at the end of the year as gifting hits its peak. That can overwhelm some providers. “We know that every January we will get calls from online gift businesses that have been let down over the pre Christmas period by their suppliers and want to move on,” says Osborne.
At Imprint there have always been Inca flatbed inkjet presses, currently Onset X3s with robot arms to move substrates into position. But as the company has expanded from retail into construction it has needed to produce rollfed materials and a new Vutek printer filled the gap.
However, that is not what sets Imprint apart explains Bullivant. “There are any number of companies that have the same machinery and even more capacity, so we lead sales presentations with a technology pitch because that is unique to us.”
One aspect is about campaign management, well beyond collating display material according to stores and walk throughs. It is about using data and applications to manage entire campaigns for retailers and to improve the effectiveness of those campaigns. “Data is key to making better informed decisions and means customers can take action faster. And it makes those clients sticky. Software is the glue.” Very few leave.
Handford agrees: “The big thing for us is creating the stickiness for clients and having the team of developers is key to that.” The software produced can be provided under a white label provision. “We reckon there are 150,000 people using our software in some way.”
The company has been investing over the course of the year. As well as the Quadient mailing line, Pureprint installed the eight-unit XL106 at the start of the year. It came via Close Asset.
There is a new Horizon binder, a Muller Martini Primera stitching line installed in the spring and the second HP Indigo 100K. The main factory has been reconfigured to reduce the distances that a sheet travels through printing, folding and cutting, and binding. Two Kodak Magnus platesetters provide plates that are processed conventionally.
Looking to the future, Handford says: “Inkjet is definitely part of the future. The question is what and when. At the moment a litho press can switch from a direct mail job to print packaging, to a book. We would have to find the right product for inkjet.
“We will also be looking at acquisitions. These can bring new tools for our sales teams.” If the opportunity came up, the company can take it. “We have supportive shareholders,” he adds.
He knows too that as companies are let down by existing suppliers, Pureprint’s reputation will attract calls. Handford says: “We know that we will get calls from gifting companies that have lost business and customers because they have been let by an existing supplier.
“We are very good at putting ink on paper. It’s what we do after that, what we turn that sheet into that matters.”
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