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As England and Germany discovered at the World Cup earlier this month, even when the odds appear to be stacked in your favour, there can always be room for an upset.

When it comes to beginnings, mailing film printer Polyprint Mailing Films in Norwich definitely started the England way. Founded by Jonathan Neville in October 1988, its first job came about so quickly that there was no time to set up a gleaming new print facility.

We had no lights in the building, says Neville, the company’s managing director. We bought a secondhand press which we plugged into next door’s toilet.

At the time he decided to start the company Neville was working for enveloping business Transmail. According to Neville, the company was one of the few mailing houses to handle its own polythene printing. Over the years, capacity outweighed usage and we began to sell to the trade, he says. Eventually I thought ‘why don’t I do it myself?’.

Polyprint is still on that same facility, on an airfield in Norwich, although it has been through many changes. That secondhand press made way for 11 more used machines, which were crammed into the building.

Watershed year
The watershed year for the business was 1995, when it installed its first new machine, a Uteco six-colour press. A year later an identical machine was added as the company began to ramp up production.

Polyprint now has five eight-colour Uteco machines. The last of these went in a few months ago, taking Polyprint’s investment in the last two years up to £2m. Meanwhile the second six-colour machine is still going strong, 14 years after it began running.
The company is going through another major change at the moment, migrating further into food packaging printing. Traditionally, it has handled magazine mailing, only occasionally touching on work outside that remit.

Neville says: We have made some good investments in the last few years and we are looking to build on that now. With the extra colours we can go down the added-value route and attract more trade print work. That is where we want to be – food packaging and trade print. The margins are different, and that is the direction I see us going in.

Indeed it could be said that Polyprint has already gone down that route. Although the company moved into trade printing only two years ago, the split of magazine work to trade jobs is already 60-40 and Neville expects that to continue to change in non-magazine work’s favour.

Neville sees his company as having a huge advantage over the other companies that are offering film printing to the trade, because it is already ahead of the pack when it comes to turnaround times.

We are used to turning around jobs in a week, he says. Recently we had a printer come to us with some bread wrappers. We were asked if we could turn them around in four to six weeks.

The environment is one area where Polyprint is heavily involved. In this day and age, most print companies are claiming to be environmentally responsible businesses, but Polyprint goes that little bit further, and has been doing so for a long time.
As the company handles millions of tonnes of polythene a year, it has long-established contracts in place to recycle the material. Polyprint has now put those contracts to use in setting up a return scheme alongside its local council.

Residents can drop off their polythene in Polyprint’s bins, where it will be collated with the company’s waste. The scheme has even been expanded so polythene can be sent to Polyprint from anywhere else in the UK, as some areas have no collection points.

Neville adds: It is a rare day to walk out the front door and not have a box or two of polythene waiting for us. We started doing it a few years ago but now the government has said you have to recycle – so we have to prove everything we do – we don’t make money on it anymore.

Moving into new areas with better margins should mean that Polyprint need not worry about its lost revenue from recycling. And although the company has come from a far-from-glorious start, it certainly appears to be heading in the direction of a world-beater. Perhaps Neville could offer Fabio Capello some advice.

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Polyprint Mailing
Formed 1988
Managing director Jonathan Neville
Based Norwich
Sectors film printing for magazine sector and for the trade
Turnover £7m
Staff 57
Kit five eight-colour Uteco presses, one six-colour