The UK commercial printer in 2023 might easily be forgiven for suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. First comes the ongoing threat from the internet and the continuing cult of digital marketing, then came Covid followed swiftly by an energy crisis, paper supply problems and the cost of living crisis.
However, small printers, like cockroaches perhaps, have an ability to survive. Not all, as many have turned the machinery off, closed the door and walked away. Others have undergone structural transformation, perhaps into non printing print businesses.
But others have have survived and in the summer of 2023 if not actually turning away work are not scraping around for it either.
Some have specialised in certain styles of work, some have built up a loyal customer base across the years, others are taking on the online print giants by being smarter and more agile. There is no crib sheet for success.
In short the small commercial printer in 2023 has evolved into a operation that is more diverse, more resilient and more matched to customer needs than ever before. Any lingering arrogance from the days when printers could tell customers when the job would be ready (usually in two weeks’ time), has been wiped away. The small printers that have made it through the last couple of years seem to be in good shape.
Covid ironically has helped. Those businesses that had some healthcare work or could conjure some or had the right contacts suddenly had demands for print. The decision that print was a vital industry and therefore did not have to close down, was proven as printers churned out the forms, the posters, the packaging and especially the social distancing messaging that was suddenly everywhere.
Orchard Press in Swindon is typical. When lockdown was announced, the company had no idea what it would do. There was some work that might enable it to stumble on for a couple of months, says managing director Jason Grubb. Most staff were told to stay at home while he and the ops manager Steve Pointer stayed in the factory to process whatever work was around.
And then the calls for social distancing signage came in from the health service, the police and all quarters. These were swiftly advertised on the website with a clear unit price attached. And companies hurriedly bought them. “People needed them straightaway and didn’t care about the mark up or that there was no volume discount,” he says.
The company ran its large format machine at full tilt churning through up to ten rolls of media a week. The printed material piled up in the reception ready for the orders to come in. Then the rules changed and instructions to stay 2 metres apart were out of date along with the preprinted material. Even though there were piles of print in stock that now had to be scrapped, the margins earned in the previous months were good compensation.
Staff had come back after only a few weeks on furlough as some certainty settled over the country.
Now on the other side of the lockdowns, Orchard has emerged with a set of customers in hospitals and so on that it had not worked for before. It also benefits from additional work coming from other print companies that failed to make it through the pandemic. A number of printers in Swindon did not make it, says Grubb.
Today the focus is on mitigating the cost of energy. Old habits have changed. Machines are no longer left on standby overnight or over weekends, but are switched off. “Our volumes are where they were pre Covid,” he says. “But buying patterns have changed thanks to work from home. There are distinct periods in the day when people order print, one in the morning between 11-12 and close to 5pm each afternoon.
“We used to talk to professional print buyers, now it’s very much about youngsters who did graphic design at college and who are likely to ask for 5,000 flyers for Friday and here’s the artwork on a PowerPoint.”
The housekeeping continues into buying paper. Orchard has continued to enjoy ordering for next day delivery, but with prices rising by as much as 80-100%, the company has worked hard to keep its MIS updated with the latest costs. “We need to be sure that we are quoting the correct price,” he says. It has worked to date and Orchard is confident going forwards: “We have to be brave as printers. We have to keep pushing on.”
That has led to investment for many, particularly to automate finishing departments and to be able to cope with similar number of jobs but with fewer staff. For some it is about keeping the margin in-house, something that a decade ago was behind widespread investment in laminators. The plastic film covering has fallen out of fashion to some extent while those printers likely to need in-house lamination have made the investment. It is a replacement market now. But not exclusively.
Apprintable, a company in the north west suburbs of London, bought a laminator from Morgana last year. While not the company’s first laminator, it was the first with an automatic feeder and able to deliver a professional job. The Wembley business had earlier bought an Aerocut slitter/creaser from Morgana and this year has acquired a booklet maker from the same supplier, taking investment to around £300,000 says managing director Peter Haddad. “Most of that investment has been self funded,” he says.
The result is that work which was being sent to the trade is now produced in-house “and the margins are so much better in house”.
In a time before print, Haddad used to run club nights and events. The need for flyers and print around what is known as the ‘night time economy’ that Haddad understands, provides a good grounding for the business. “We are small but very much in touch with our customers which means that we can adapt quickly when the market changes,” he says. The same sector and requirement provided the foundation for Instantprint, now one of the largest printers in the country.
Haddad is ambitious though is not promising this rate of growth. Apprintable will expand and it will come through B2B online purchasing.
The company started online marketing efforts four years ago. Last year it signed up with an agency that originally recommended Adwords and now focuses on SEO rather than pay per click with Google. “That is now giving us good traction and we are starting to hit our stride,” he says.
The focus is not on the commodity products like flyers or posters where Apprintable would be lost in the tsunami of search results from businesses offering this work, but to highlight the niche products it can deliver, such as wristbands that the target audience has to source along with those flyers, tickets and posters. “And then customers come back to us because our service is reliable,” says Haddad. “Online has given us the drive to invest. We are not buying equipment for the sake of it, but for what we can sell.”
Online though does not work for every small printer. Blackwater Printing in Maldon, Essex, has had sparse pickings from its website, but this is no great problem for Ian Barbrook, its managing director. At the start of Covid he says he had no choice but to carry on in order to pay the bills even though, he says, “I was not sure how I would survive”. The answer came in the form of a call from the council asking about social distancing material. Barbrook could produce this on his Epson and did so. He has not looked back.
The business had originally moved into large format to meet the needs of a garden centre that was a customer. He bought a Mutoh that has long since been retired. At the time small format digital was the driver. Now although the standard fare of flyers and business cards, posters and leaflets are offered, Blackwater buys these in from the likes of Route 1 or Tradeprint.
“We farm all that out as they are cheaper than we can buy materials for our Xerox,” he says. “We might as well place the work with them and I can go home each night instead of working extra hard. These companies have changed the printing industry and we have to get used to that.”
What the trade printers cannot do is the mix of work that passes through the Epson each day. It might be displays and banners, vehicle graphics, signage, Dibond, posters. “We offer clothing, but that’s through a contact that has an embroidery business,” he says. Another has a Zund for digital cutting on rigid materials. “We do not do instant print, so there is a limit to what we do,” he says.
The ‘we’ includes Len, who is now 80 and used to work at ET Heron, and at the other end of the scale, his daughter “who can do everything I can do”, says Barbrook.
The industry is no longer what it was when he started work 34 years ago, a lot of change has taken place since, but he points out print has been around for 400-500 years and still needs printers.
“I can see a van drive around locally that I printed the graphics for and a banner or sign that we produced and can think “I did that’,” he says. “But I’m not sure I would start a business in print now.”
That sentiment did not dissuade entrepreneur Phil Milburn from taking on the Minuteman Press franchise in Norwich in 2018. Milburn has experience in a number of other sectors and in franchising. He had also built a substantial Canon dealership in a previous life.
With Minuteman he could draw a line under spending time away from home and can sleep in the same bed each night. Internet marketing plays a big role for the company, which has bought the Adwords for ‘Printer Norwich’ to bolster the organic search result. “We get eight to ten inquiries a day via Google,” he says.
Importantly Minuteman’s location on the edge of the city enables customers to drive to the store and park right outside. “They like to come in and see us, ask us to produce a sample and then to print the job. If something goes wrong and we mess up, we will reprint it.”
This is not a service that a business or individual would receive from one of the major online printers where automation has made buying print a blind process.
When Covid hit, Milburn had the idea of printing for a local GP surgery. He identified 93 in the area, visited each in turn and as a result produced any amount of floor stickers, signs, banners, face shield, gloves or sanitiser fluid dispensers. “We never shut,” he says.
Nor did Printworks. The Wolverhampton commercial printer is very much old school. It continued to produce work for hospitals across the Black Country when lockdown hit. “That kept us busy,” says managing director Jim Monks, citing hospitals in Wolverhampton, Walsall and Dudley that it supplies. Since then the company has picked up work from businesses that have closed, voluntarily or otherwise, while making investments of its own.
Printworks has always been cautious about spending, but when the bills to look after a 20-year-old Horizon booklet maker exceeded the cost of financing a new one, the family owned business took the plunge and now runs the latest SPF200L machine alongside a Heidelberg MO-V four-colour litho press and GTOs. A Konica Minolta provides digital print support. With the new Horizon Printworks can expand its horizons thanks to the additional capacity.
Back in East Anglia, DSD in Kings Lynn has been enjoying a bounce back in the first half of 2023 after a subdued year in 2022. It too has upgraded its stitching capacity to cope with short run and long run work, on the one hand for a handful of copies, on the other for a magazine that comes in at more than 1 million copies. A Duplo iSaddle 5.0 copes with both. “My operators spend minimal time setting up and changing jobs,” says managing director Shaun Simpson.
“Everything is automated and we hardly need to do any manual adjustments. It leaves staff free to do more complex and labour intensive work around the factory floor. The majority of our work comes from referrals.
“We offer a good service at a good price, and our customers keep coming back for more. We offer anything and everything print related, barring newspaper work, and we’re not simply local printers, our customers are from all across the country. We’re comfortable with the steady work and the honesty that comes with it, we offer no artifice or special treatment, we treat all our customers the same, from huge multi nationals to students asking for the odd print job. I think that is key, we are open and honest and it’s why customers keep returning to us.”
That is almost the mantra for today’s commercial printers. Customers were always important, but their role might get lost behind the importance of the technology. This is no longer the case for the smaller successful print business. Customers are key.
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