Gary Peeling and Jon Bailey received an unexpected round of applause after addressing the staff at the new Precision Proco West London subsidiary on Wednesday last week. This came two days after a year of talks had culminated in the acquisition of the Photobox factory at Willen Field Road, Park Royal, with the transfer of ownership talking place on 1 August. The people there are looking forward to ownership by a business where print is absolutely central to what it does.
It gives Precision Proco a fifth major manufacturing site and takes turnover for the print on demand business to £75 million. Terms of the deal are not disclosed other than the 130 staff will transfer to Precision Proco under Tupe terms.
“Photobox was looking to outsource their production,” says Precision Proco chief executive Gary Peeling. “They would rather focus less on running a factory than developing the technology and marketing new products through their front end.”
The plant specialises in personalised gifts and is the largest producer of wall art and personalised canvases in the UK, as well as cups, fridge magnets and other photo gifts. It runs large format inkjet presses along with matched finishing and three HP Indigos. “The central problem they have is utilisation, except for five weeks of the year, which makes it difficult to sustain” says Peeling. At peak season, the plant can handle 60-70,000 orders a day, falling away during the rest of the year. While the company has been busy during the pandemic lockdowns, in more recent months this has slowed as consumers have exhausted their supply of photos to print. “We need people to get out on holiday to create new memories that they print,” says a spokesman.
Peeling adds: “We can bring in work all year around through corporate work, Where The Trade Buys and the Inky API. And we will invest in direct to garment equipment to print apparel.” WhereTheTradeBuys continues to grow, he explains, supporting both a trade buyers side and a direct to end user side. It now supports a full set of Canva templates and roller banners which can be printed in Wembley.
The deal builds on a long term relationship between Photobox and Precision Proco. Precision has been the supplier of photobooks, calendars and cards for Photobox. “The reason that the Photobox exists in the first place is that Precision Proco did not exist at that time,” says Peeling. “We got into this single copy print on demand business through the partnership with Photobox originally, developing the software as a result.”
It means that there is already a close workflow integration and appreciation of the SLAs that Photobox requires. The Willen Field Road plant is its best performing factory with fewest customer complaints or late deliveries. Peeling adds: “They are used to print on demand day in and day out. There is a lot of best practice we can pick up. It’s a really big positive for us.”
Other than for expansion into direct for germane next year, there is no need for investment at the new site. “We will be developing Dagenham into a book production super site,” Peeling adds. This builds on expanded corporate contracts and will require installation of a PUR perfect binder to cope with litho printed sections. Any books that need to be printed on a continuous inkjet press will be printed on the HP PageWide T series press in Sheffield – at least until volumes require a mirrored investment in Dagenham.
