Mason worked as an air traffic controller for the RAF until 1993. “I decided I didn’t have enough stress in my life,” he jokes. “So I left the air force and set up my own print business. That did the trick.”

The first Inkshop began life in some old bank premises in Glasgow’s then less-than-salubrious East End. “Customers had to step over the drunks on our doorstep, and we had drug dealers doing business just outside,” Mason recalls. But times have shifted around Inkshop’s presence: now, Glasgow’s East End is known as Merchant City, and will play host to the Commonwealth Games in 2014. “The whole area is getting millions spent on regeneration, and it’s scrubbing up well,” he says. “We’re happy we’ve ridden out the bad times here, and now we’re in the heart of the business district, which is essential for us.”

And Inkshop’s own image hasn’t escaped a brush-up. “15 years ago the name Inkshop was quite clever – print was new to the high street,” Mason says. “But since desktop printers have become so widely used, people think Inkshop sells cartridges.” This was the main factor behind his decision to rebrand as Inkshop Printing. “We had to put print back in the title, so people would know what we were about,” he says.

More colour, same price
What hasn’t changed over the years is the type of work Inkshop does. “It’s still leaflets, brochures, catalogues, flyers – all the usual corporate promotional work.” But the specification has changed out of all recognition, Mason says. “We set out with a single-colour AB Dick 9840, a little portrait press, and now we’re using a ten-colour Speedmaster. Still the same leaflets and brochures, though – it’s just all process colour now.” Amazingly, the company’s price list has remained fairly static, with prices for single-colour work “almost identical” to the four-colour work of today. Mason puts it down to increasing automation: the firm’s prices in 1993 had a much higher component of labour in them, which kept them high, whereas the 2008 prices have only a small labour component, but a greater element of capital investment, “and one has just about balanced out the other,” he says.

Mason’s policy of technological innovation has worked to keep Inkshop leading the way in its quickprint bracket. The company was “delighted” to win the British Association of Print and Copyshops award for Business of the Year back in 2005, in recognition of its achievements in “pushing the quickprint envelope,” Mason puns. Never shy of taking a technological risk, Inkshop has been the first UK customer for a number of presses – including AB Dick’s first multicolour SRA3 press in 2000, the first AB Dick digital press in 2003, and most recently the first Konica Minolta System 18 colour digital press. “Just about every single penny of profit is ploughed back into the business,” Mason says. “Technology is one of the key ways that we stay ahead of the game.”

High flying
Inkshop was also the first UK high-street printer to implement a hub-and-spoke model, with all its stores feeding work into the central production hub at the Cumbernauld factory. Mason describes the model as “the only logical, profitable way to run the business,” and laughs when queried about how delivery schedules are affected by the remote location of some Inkshop branches, together with weather. “Don’t talk to me about weather,” he says, “it’s one of our big challenges.” So big, in fact, that in 1999 the company bought its own helicopter, partly to deliver work to outlying branches when roads were impassable, but also to help Mason keep in touch with his stores. But this, bought as a solution to the impractical geography, brought its own impracticalities. “It was expensive to run, and wasn’t that great in low cloud or fog,” Mason says. “It looked great, all kitted out with our livery, and it was fantastic advertising. But it didn’t justify its costs and hassle.” In the end, Inkshop got rid of the helicopter, and work is now delivered by standard business post either direct to customers or to the stores; Mason himself travels everywhere in his Aston Martin.

MIS launch
Inkshop’s most recent technological innovation will be the launch of its own MIS and workflow system, written entirely to Mason’s specification and due for commissioning this month. He describes the process as “hairy and horrifically complicated,” even though the basic requirement was very simple. “We used to have a keycard system for scheduling jobs, and the board was 37 feet long, fair enough, but it was still a board. And that’s all we wanted from a MIS. But it’s taken us a year, where we thought it would take us three months.” The final system, however, is massively sophisticated: it takes all Inkshop branches’ work and within the parameters of time, cost and materials, gangs appropriate synergistic jobs up on to a B2 sheet – entirely automatically. “The shops send in their work, and it isn’t touched by human hand until it comes out of the Suprasetter as a press-ready plate,” Mason says.

Imaginative business thinking is also high on Inkshop’s agenda. In the last year, the company has moved into franchising. Currently, two of its existing shops – Edinburgh and Dunfermline – have been franchised out, with a further two new branches – Stirling and Hamilton – coming onstream in September last year. Mason has put some very thorough work into his franchise model, most significantly into the question of pricing: “With prices as silly as they are in the print industry right now, you have to question whether the idea of franchising is really going to work, because of the extra burden on the franchisee in terms of paying their fees.” But having investigated comparable prices, turnround times and service levels, Mason is happy that Inkshop offers a good franchise proposition: “Because our franchisees have to place their work through the Cumbernauld hub, we’re confident we can keep our prices about 15% to 30% lower than anywhere else. That means franchise fees can be paid and the franchisee can still make a comfortable profit.”

Letting go of his baby, however, was harder. “Until we started franchising, it was all mine,” he says. “It was painful to see people step in and take it over, running it under the Inkshop name.” But with the pain came the gain: “All of a sudden, my workload decreased, and I realised why I was doing it.” His aim, he says, is to franchise all Inkshop’s stores in the coming few years.

Looking ahead
Plans for Inkshop’s future are typically diverse. The company is shortly to launch its own mobile print centre as a franchised venture: a 7.5-tonne lorry, bristling with the latest communications gadgetry, will ply its trade among specified Scottish towns starting in April this year. Jobs will be delivered to the Cumbernauld server via the internet, and delivered direct to the customer, or to the lorry’s home location in Ayr. And – perhaps surprisingly late – Inkshop is about to discover digital. The Konica Minolta System 18 has been on trial at Cumbernauld for the last three months, and Mason describes its integrated print-and-finishing architecture as “a fantastic fit with our business model – it’s so automated that there’s no hands-on stuff from one end to the other.” It’s this combination of hands-on and hands-off that seems to have generated Inkshop Printing’s success – and Mason’s plans for the future would promise to underpin that success long into the future.

Printer Inkshop Printing
Number of staff 23 at Cumbernauld hub, plus franchise staff in stores
Annual turnover £2.6m
Problem Needed to grow business with far-flung locations
Solution Moved to hub-and-spoke production and part-franchise business model

INSPECTION LESSONS
Staying ahead of the game

• Site stores in business districts, so print facilities are on hand and in the minds of local businesspeople
• Keep the name relevant so that there is limited possibility of misunderstanding
• Keep prices competitive, but bear in mind this is only one element of the quickprint offering – the others are turnaround time, quality and convenience
• Keep investing in new technology – and if the technology doesn’t exist for what you want to do, invent it
• Keep production central, to minimise costs and maximise utilisation levels