Print Junction’s beginnings were inauspicious. This is not a company established in the 1980s when printing was a licence to make money, nor even in the 1990s when print was still the only game in town for news, for advertising or for reading. Managing director Joe Adams was then at school, helping out in IT lessons whenever the technology expanded beyond the capabilities of the trained English teacher drafted in to impart computing and programming knowledge to a class of teenagers.
After leaving school the young Adams had a spell selling pianos. He was good at it, earning plenty of commission that was never actually paid. Adams left and the company quickly went bust. At the same time in 2007 in the mid of recession, his father was casting around for a business venture and decided on printing. It required no previous experience which is just as well. “We had no idea what we were doing,” Adams says. “Consequently we produced a lot of rubbish.”
The Canon CLC3220 was stretched beyond what it was intended for and the family team, in which mother Sonja plays a crucial role, struggled to meet demand for business cards and the like. “These kept coming back because they were rubbish. And then gradually the jobs stopped coming back and the customers kept coming back,” says Adams.
Sonja headed up the sales with Joe in production. “By 2013 we were starting to make some money,” he adds. Then disaster. His father died suddenly. Mother and son decided to carry on with the young business which had now outgrown its kitchen table origins and had begun a series of moves as growth continued. The pivot, however, was a suggestion from Sonja. “She said we should focus on the schools marketplace in a big way,” Adams says. “I said that this was a daft idea and that it would never work.” Mum was right.
Eight years later Print Junction has emerged from its busiest Christmas season yet thanks largely to that decision to focus on schools. That lies behind growth of 35% a year and has made the Ashford printer one of the largest printers in this niche.
For Print Junction the schools market is about linking up with PTAs earlier in the year to raise funds by selling Christmas cards, calendars, mugs, gift tags and now tea towels, that children have designed. It means orders for cards to be sent to granny or perhaps for granny to send to her friends. And for every order there is a donation to the school’s PTA fund raising effort.
It is a win all round because print like this has an emotional pull that generic cards or stock calendars simply cannot deliver.
There are many more items that might be pushed out through the websites to PTAs, but Adams is careful not to swamp customers with a flood of products that might confuse or not be understood by the volunteers running the committees. This is a case where limited choice, speed, simplicity and the customer experience win he believes.
It is a market that is focused on Christmas for both cards and gift giving and pushes at Print Junction’s resources. For that period, its normal staffing level of around 12 becomes more than 40 and the business operates around the clock.
After its peripatetic early years when the company seemed to be on the move regularly, Print Junction has settled in the former Geerings office equipment operation in Ashford before that was sold to ASL. Along the journey the growing business moved from the CLC to a Canon C755i and then to an ImagePress before switching to Ricoh.
Today the print firepower is provided by two Ricoh Pro C9110 digital presses, which Adams is delighted with. “There is no intention of leaving Ricoh,” he says. There is support from a number of large format roll to roll printers, the only pair of operating Touchline CPC375 finishing units in the UK, a Duplo DBM 150 and now a Duplo DC746 multifinisher. Three double-headed Pressmech heat presses are on order to apply designs printed on Sawgrass dye sublimation machines to the tea towels.
There is also an embroidery machine, an old Duplo folder in a nearby warehouse and a Morgana Autocreaser and guillotines. A large bench in the centre of the room allows staff to assemble components for each order: different invitations and other elements, for a wedding for example.
His experience in nursing the early CLC have enabled Adams to keep the Multigraf machines running on a limited diet of wedding stationery which fills the plant as the schools work dies down. The wedding work comes through a tie up with a designer working through Etsy and will pick up again this year as lockdown restrictions are lifted.
This is now the time of year when pitches are made to PTAs resulting in sign ups for the end of the year. Print Junction needs to fashion a branded online site that is tailored to the school and to the range of products it wants to sell. Last year Print Junction had secured the business of 1,000 schools. This year it is hoping for 1,200-1,300. “There are 13,000 schools in the UK,” says Adams, “so there are plenty more to go for.”
There is also opportunity around other school events, leaving days and fetes, for example, and this year there is the unique position of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, with mugs ready for decoration and 30,000 tea towels in store. Midway through February, Print Junction had signed up more than 250 schools.
The company is not alone in chasing this niche. Adams names two larger businesses but says that like challenger brands in other industries, car rental for instance, Print Junction is working harder at customer relations. He also says it has software which allows it to be more flexible and transparent for users, giving more control to the chosen representative at each school, extending deadlines.
“Others do not have the technology that we have. We have grown because of the software that we have developed,” he explains. It has been honed and tweaked over the last nine years and is now a robust web based application that is simple to administer and simple to interact with. Adams described the structure and way that the site should operate with a partner engaged to create the coding. It is intended to be simple to set up, fast to implement and to customise for each school. It means that Print Junction can take on schools for two or three weeks longer than others with more intricate software. It can captures those schools that are slower to reach a decision.
“We are talking to the schools every single day because this is mainstream business for us, not just something we do as an add on to the business,” he says. “We deliberately limit the product range because we want set up to be quicker and simpler for organisers. Others do not do this.”
Each site is run by a PTA member, but it is the parents who place the orders and check the artwork is correct. Each gets a link via SMS to take them directly to that card design to make sure that Johnny’s work has not been switched for Samantha’s. Then the parents decide how many to order and make the payment via Stripe.
Orders for each school are consolidated on one file to be sent to the Ricohs and for finishing on the Multigraf machines, or now the Duplo. A file can have perhaps 109 different pieces of artwork which is packaged up as a single imposed job for printing. The different sets of cards are then boxed up and sent as a single order to the school in good time for posting out. The school will distribute the individual sets to the relevant parents. At all times the parents and organiser can see where the job is and when it will arrive.
The continuing development of the software allows the business to claim R&D tax credits because this is technology that simply did not exist before, Adams points out. “And it’s this software that gives us advantages,” he says.
The next development for the software platform will be in two directions. First there will be a trade portal to allow customers to specify and order their print through a version of the website and second Adams plans to find a partner to license the product to take it into Germany.
The German market is a deliberate choice: English speaking countries like the US, Canada or Australia have different schools structures that are not as suitable for this, he explains. Germany fits closest.
“We want to strike a relationship with a company with a similar set and outlook to ours. We have the experience to help them set up and approach the schools as well as the software itself,” he says.
The trade portal will be for businesses in the area that have requirements for different types of print. A railway company uses Print Junction for materials for onboarding new staff, for staff uniforms, for training materials and so on. The portal will have agreed prices per item that can be ordered automatically.
“We want to work with companies that are in a 30-40 mile radius of us. The customers that stick with is do so because it’s easy to keep everything in one place. We can do website development and social media posts, for the company in the railway industry as well as printed materials they need. We are not a traditional printer in any way shape or form. We have a wide skill set here and if there is something we can do, well why not?”
A site for independent funeral directors – and for grieving relatives – is underway. This will break away from the sometimes formulaic structures for an order of service on the one hand by allowing the clients to create their own design templates. It will remove a sometimes aggravating administrative task from the process of administering to the last wishes of the deceased. Even in death few think much about print, yet it will often be something tangible that mourners will take away and will keep.
“It’s all about finding the niches where we can add value,” Adams explains. It is equally about thinking through the needs of those customers and their customers and how the service might be used and being able to anticipate that rather than taking standard web to print products and standard print products and then labelling them as orders of service, for example.
The investment in the Duplo DC746 will give the company both additional capacity and reassurance should the ageing Multigrafs fail at a crucial time. “And as it has turned out a new contract has doubled our need for it,” he says.
The sheets from the digital presses are loaded and processed, slit, creased and perforated as necessary before flopping into the delivery tray. A CPM cross perforation module is on order for the DC to increase flexibility of what can be produced. But mostly it down to automation.
“The benefit of the Duplo is about saving time and it’s about saving labour,” Adams explains. “This is going to save us about 20 hours of manual labour a week and that means it will pay for itself.”
Initial training after installation was finished took just two hours. “If you understand print and Duplo’s approach, at the end of the day it’s intuitive,” he adds. Duplo offers an optional folder attachment, but this is not necessary for Print Junction, says Adams. Jobs are cut and creased and packed flat to be folded by hand when at their final destination.
The next step might be another Ricoh, perhaps with a fifth colour to offer silver and varnish effects to enhance wedding stationery that is set to book this year as ceremonies postponed over the last couple of years are able to take place at last.
There will be no rush this time to move from its current premises, with Adams reckoning that Print Junction can easily double or triple turnover from the site. That might not be too far away. Even during the pandemic the company has been growing at double-digit rates even in its core business.
By the time the higher margin project work is included, growth is at 15-30% a year. Demand for embroidered clothing is climbing nicely, the Duplo will comfortably handle 150 jobs a day, and the penetration of schools market is increasing. Not bad for a business led by a self confessed nerd.
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