We are celebrating our 40th anniversary in the business this year!
Early days
Tim Besley, our Founder and Managing Director, said: “We are absolutely thrilled to be celebrating our 40th anniversary this year. The company started in 1983, initially as a traditional printers run by my father, who ran a stationery business too, and I before we moved into luxury brochures and specialist direct mail printing and more.
“We then started producing food packaging and now work across all forms of retail packaging. Whilst we still produce an amount of traditional ‘commercial’ print, retail packaging represents almost all of our business.
Going above and beyond
“We are not just printers; we go beyond that simple transaction and are always customer-curious, working closely with our clients to ensure they are presented with every option for what they might possibly need, and we look at what value we can add. For example, we go and visit clients, see how their products are produced and packed, do an audit of their needs and make suggestions of how we can improve their packaging and generally make life easier for them.
“When I started working for my father’s stationery business in the school holidays, I never could have predicted that we’d end up buying a little printworks and growing it to something as substantial as the operation we have today. I’d like to say a huge ‘thank you’ to all our staff and customers, who this wouldn’t have been possible without over the past 40 years.
“Our niche has been packaging for food producers but also have clients in healthcare, beauty, lifestyle and DIY industries and now, in our 40th year, we’re working on growing our overall retail packaging offering to cover all sectors.”
Our 40-year history
During our 40-year history there have been many changes in the business including moving to new purpose-built premises in 2001 and investing in the latest equipment.
In 2021, we spent £120,000 on extending our production facility to provide our customers with bespoke shorter print-runs for any printed packaging they may be planning.
This extension and upgrade to our in-house facility enables us to speed up our production of packaging especially sleeves, auto-lock and crash-lock boxes, single-line and multi-glued boxes, and wallets and pocket folders.
It allows us to complete jobs more quickly and improve delivery speeds. As well as giving our customers the benefit of being able to use us for shorter print-runs up to 300,000. They can now more easily trial products for particular events or showcase new flavours or have tailormade packaging for promotional activities such as competitions and limited editions.
By improving the speed of our operation, we’re increasing efficiency and that in turn has a knock-on impact with regards to the energy we’re saving when producing our clients’ packaging requirements, which is great for everyone’s sustainability moving forward.
Carbon balanced
We made the decision to be one of a handful of UK printers who are carbon balanced. Under this initiative, the business is audited by Carbon Co who measure energy use, recycling, waste policies, safe disposal of chemicals amongst other metrics to calculate a company’s carbon footprint. Once the figure has been confirmed, we then donate an appropriate sum to the World Land Trust to invest in environmental schemes.
This Carbon Balanced scheme is also a huge opportunity for our customers to communicate the sustainability of their own packaging – it’s something consumers are actively looking for when making a buying purchase, so if they can see that they’re directly contributing to a real-life conservation project it’s a win-win.
We’ve had some of our clients use this Carbon Balanced status to tell a story around their own packaging, as it’s directly contributing to the protection of valuable yet fragile habitats around the world.
