What really went wrong at Bezier? It's a complicated back story, with various factors at play. There's been a revolving door of management at the group over the past couple of years, and that never helps. Especially not when some sort of blame game seems to be at play, per this reference in Bezier Ltd's latest accounts to performance being "extremely poor" immediately after HIG acquired it, "due to a failed IT upgrade, implemented by former management". Too much reliance on big customers. The loss of the huge Asda account was, understandably, a major blow. But if you're going to deal with great big accounts like that, you have to have a strategy that involves life without them. With other key clients such as Boots and Dixons also heading for the exit door the print business dwindled in size alarmingly. As someone put it the other day: "They seem to have reached the point where their overheads exceed their income." And while the margins were probably decent on those historical contracts, it sounds like some of the other work taken on by the group was at marginal pricing. Which is fine, until that becomes your core business. Was Bezier a victim of the travails of High Street retailers? It cites budget cuts and clients moving their spend into digital and social media as one of the reasons behind yesterday's announcement. But there's still plenty of point-of-sale print out there, and the message from other printers in this space is that yes, of course clients are careful about what they spend but they still want and need print because the ROI is there and it works. Old hands like myself will remember that Bezier was born out of the Wace business, created in the 1998 buyout of the then "Wace UK", comprising all of its UK print ops bar Corporate Print in Swindon and the Ferry Pickering packaging business. From the very outset Bezier probably had too much debt. Unfortunately, it's become yet another example of a highly-leveraged private equity buyout deal in print that hasn't worked out, which will be a major downer for anyone in this business hoping to persuade institutional investors to back something big in future.