Say What? A quick word with James Kinsella

The growth of Bluetree has been nothing short of spectacular, growing to a business with a turnover of £94 million in very short order. Its story from a student start up to one of the UK’s largest print businesses, let alone online print businesses, has been told before. It was swift to act during the pandemic beginning production of protective face masks in this country and continuing to make these in their millions, working too on improved versions that do not hide the wearer’s face completely. 

What was the opportunity with Kingsbury?

Having Kingsbury has allowed us to go for work we wouldn’t have gone for before. We had always looked at Kingsbury as being in a very, very different market to Bluetree. Books has been a growing market for Bluetree and Kingsbury expands that, allowing us to expand the range of products we sell to Route1 customers, including K-Bind. It gives us greater perfect binding capacity. What can take ten or more hours on the Horizon binders is finished in two hours on the Kolbus. And we think there’s still a gap for good case binding in the UK.

What does Bluetree do for Kingsbury?

So Bluetree can bring something to Kingsbury in terms of its digital print capacity and firepower to enable Kingsbury to take on jobs that Kingsbury by itself could not do. Having the two operations is creating something bigger than either one was previously. For 50,000 copies of book for a US customer we used digital print to add a name and unique QR code to each book. That would not have been possible before.

Might other expansions follow?

We want to look at more areas in the publishing market. We have been flat out in our core market. There’s a couple of avenues we might take, including more expansion into cartons.