Epic Print in Dorchester can point to Covid as the start of a journey leading to Stationers’ Hall and the accolade for Innovation in Business Process for 2024. It picked up the award for Cupround, a box to hold 20 used takeaway coffee cups and to divert them from landfill to recycling at the James Cropper paper mill in Cumbria.
It has the potential to change the dynamics of collecting spent coffee cups, which despite good intentions, has not achieved a major break through. Cupround will be rolled out next year with major coffee chains in partnership with the National Cup Recycling Scheme. When it does Cupround will be helping to feed production of notebooks and other stationery products using Cropper’s paper made from recycled coffee cups.
Back in 2020 managing director Mark Downey says the Epic had completed an order for 12,000 notebooks for a customer in Italy. These were shipped in 28 February and were expected to take a year to sell. By September, with shops across the country closed, fewer than 150 had been sold. A promising business venture, a diversification that would run alongside the high quality print that the business produced for design agencies and retailers, seemed to have stalled before it could start.
If notebooks could not be sold to retailers to reach consumers via the high street, Coffee Notes could be sold direct to consumers via its own website. Epic Print became a business to consumer company. The creamy Extract paper from GF Smith is core to everything and positions the note books as environmentally conscious, something that also drives other decisions for the product. The binding wire used for ring binding are not coated in plastic making them harder to recycle. “We are the largest user of naked wire in the country,” says Downey. There are fewer holes, two to the inch rather than three, to save on the amount of wire used.
The covers are French bound, where the cover material is folded over to produce a 600gsm cover from a 300gsm recycled sheet, without using adhesives. The covers use a variety of papers, sourced from Italy and Germany as well as the UK, being made from recovered textiles or from the waste produced in beer making, from agricultural waste to form the eight different collections that are available to order from the website. The covers are embellished, but not with foils, but with blind embossing which is effective and consumable free.
The notebooks are offered with blank pages, a pattern of dots or rules. Where rules or dots are selected, these are not printed in a composite grey as most general notebooks are, but in a 25-35% tint of black. The aim is to make recycling easier says Downey.
Pricing puts the Coffee Notes products at a premium point, but not a luxury item. They are popular with teachers, designers, doctors, academics says Downey, professionals that make a deliberate choice about the stationery they use. As well as three sizes of notebook – piccolo, medio and grande – to continue the coffee theme, there are weekly and monthly planners, organiser pads and shopping jotters (in packs of three).
Now the company has signed branding deals with a number of organisations that will market the product under their name: River Cottage, a near neighbour in Dorset and the National Theatre, are prominent. “The National Theatre is our biggest customer,” says Downey. “It has become our fourth biggest customer for the business in 18 months. Others are now asking whether we can brand products for them, a brewery wants a cover made from beer products for example.”
These will end up for sale in the gift shop, being used by staff or become corporate gifts for that business. The wholesale deals has advantages over piecemeal consumer orders. “Online is key because of the greater margins, and it’s starting to change how we think about packaging of all products.”
In 2020 online was absolutely key. The disappearance of events would remove opportunities to meet people and to sell through these; the actions of the UK government ruled out any change of a thriving export business he says. Survival for the notebooks meant selling notebooks direct. “It’s nice to have our own product range. It means that we are not simply selling our print services.”
As Cupround gets underway there will be further changes and challenges. Epic will produce the boxes used to collect the cups and these will no doubt be branded according to the chain that will reclaim the cups. The challenges include how consumers can be persuaded to fill the cartons and return them to the shop in question. Some kind of incentive will be needed says Downey. “We are in discussion with eight of the largest chains. The cups get returned to Cropper for recycling rather than ending up in landfill.” Currently this is the fate for 28 billion cups in the UK each year. If Cupround can divert these, the potential for both cups and Epic Print is simply immeasurable.
