Last week's story about C3 Imaging struck an unpleasant chord that began resonating this time year.
Upon reading the creditors' list that appeared after the collapse of The Print Factory, I felt physically sick. It seemed inevitable that TPF's fall would also bring down some of the company's suppliers, and it has.
I've re-read the TPF list this week. It still makes me feel ill. According to my calculations more than 140 trade suppliers are listed - I'm excluding the paper merchants, equipment manufacturers and ink suppliers here, and just focusing on the printing companies and related services such as envelopes and finishing.
These 140-plus suppliers are owed in excess of £3m. If TPF's trade debt were a company, it would make it into the top 300 of our Top 500.
The length of the list also shows just how wide TPF had to cast its net in order to find people willing to print for it, by the time the whole house of cards collapsed. It's like some sort of dirty bomb with a fall-out area covering the whole country. It ranges from the bizarre (£300 owed to PrintWeek's local Prontaprint in Chiswick), to horrifying six-figure sums owed to SME businesses.
I called one trade finisher this morning who'd been left holding an enormous bad debt. I half-expected the phone number to ring out, or be unobtainable. Amazingly, they're still trading. "We'd dealt with them for 14 or 15 years, and had built up a trust with them, which then went pear-shaped," said the MD, mournfully, providing an abject lesson in the one-way nature of 'trust' in that particular relationship.
Meanwhile, others on the list have indeed ceased to exist, whether wholly or in part due to the TPF hit. And now C3 Imaging (another of the companies owed a six-figure sum) is trading under a CVA after being declared insolvent.
As has been noted before, the warning signs about TPF were evident way before the company eventually went pop. I really, really hope that no company will ever leave such a trail of print devastation again. But I fear this is a vain hope.
