With 50 years in print under his belt, it’s safe to say that Augustus Martin joint managing director Lascelle Barrow has pretty much seen it all: from the evolution of screen printing from an art form into a credible production method, to the wide-format revolution driven by digital inkjet. 

The good news is that he plans to put that experience to good use and, in his second stint as Fespa president, he’s set himself the target of showing the wide-format sector that the sky’s the limit. He believes that embracing change and getting excited about the possibilities of print are pre-requisites for leading any printing business into the next revolution, which, he warns, may be just around the corner.

Darryl Danielli Let’s start at the beginning: how did you get into print?

Lascelle Barrow I guess it started at school; I was in the top stream, the ‘A’ stream, and I went for a job interview in a die-making company. I didn’t even know what die-making was then, to be honest.

Was this an apprenticeship?

Sort of. But I didn’t get it. However, someone in the ‘D’ stream of our school did get the job and my teacher was not happy about this. So she decided she was going to get me a job. Her sister was secretary to the managing director at a shoe company called Saxone, Lilley & Skinner, and they had a printing department. So she arranged for me to have an interview with the personnel officer and my teacher’s sister. They sat me down and went through a whole list of questions... they basically gave me the answers to the questions. Then, they called in the manager of the department. The sister disappeared and they interviewed me again, asking exactly the same questions. Afterwards, the personnel officer just turned around to the manager and said ‘he’s got to be our candidate’ and that was that. I got a job in the screen printing department.

When was that?

Probably 1961. They sent me to the London College of Printing one day and two evenings a week. It was a very good job; they allowed me to study and there wasn’t a lot of pressure because it was an internal department, but we were allowed to be very creative in what we did, because the firm was very creative. 

What we you producing

Window displays. Saxone, Lilley & Skinner had about 500 branches at the time – it was a big company. Quite often we were printing jobs that were six, seven or eight colours plus special effects.

How long were you there?

Three years. I left after I got my City & Guilds. I must have been 18, perhaps 18 and half. I left for another job at a company that printed industrial garment labels. Around the same time, a friend I met at college, Barrie Dix [fellow joint managing director], asked if I fancied starting my own business. It sounded like a good idea. So we decided to set up a company and run it in our spare time. So we rented an attic not far from where Augustus Martin is based now and made ourselves a printing table.

You made it yourselves?

Yes. It was literally a piece of Formica. We drilled holes in it and then attached a vacuum cleaner underneath and made ourselves a hand-printing table. We made some racks to dry the prints and we were in business. Barrie had an account from a friend of his to print lampshades for British Home Stores (now BHS). We received the material and it was already cut to shape and we just printed it. We printed thousands of them, but we were never going to get rich on those. After about six months Barrie decided he was going to go full-time with the business.

Were you still working at that time then?

Yes, I was earning quite a lot of money too, for a teenager. But it was clear that the manager I was working with was going to get the sack because, well, he wasn’t very good at his job basically. So anyway, I went on holiday, but came back a day late because the plane got held up in Gibraltar and he sacked me on the spot – remember this was the ’60s. So I said to Barrie: ‘You know what? There’s two of us full-time now’. The problem was that we didn’t have much to do. I had been earning about £50 a week [around £900 today] and Barrie was earning £15. So we decided that we needed to earn £15 each. So we put £2 each in the bank to start the business proper.

So what was the plan then?

At the time we had heard that Sainsbury’s was using lots of print. All the people we knew seemed to be doing work for Sainsbury’s. So I rung them up asked for a meeting – they said yes. When I arrived at their offices, a box whizzed past my head and someone shouted ‘F****** printers!’ And it was the buyer; someone had just let him down. So he called me into his office and said ‘You’ve come on a good day. Can you do this?’ and gave me a poster and said bring back 150 the day after tomorrow. So I went back to the attic and said ‘Barrie, we’re going to get these back to him tomorrow’. We delivered it and he gave me another job, and to cut a long story short, from then [the early 1960s] until the mid to late 1990s there was never a time when we didn’t have a Sainsbury’s job in the factory – in fact we became their sole supplier in the late 1980s.

So basically you won million’s of pounds’ worth of business across four decades from being in the right place at the right time?

Maybe. But in that period we became a retail specialist too.

It’s interesting that you’ve never really strayed from your core market, working with retailers I mean, not making lampshades.

Well, we’re effectively in two markets now. Outdoor advertising and POS.

Evenly split?

No, outdoor is around 20%. But as screen printers, we weren’t really accepted as an outdoor company because the litho boys would say ‘Mmm, you can’t really have that screen printed because the quality’s not quite there’. You’ve got to remember that most printers didn’t regard screen printing as a proper process. We were the poor relation; offset was the process, screen-printing was deemed a bit arty. The truth was it was exactly the same – same repro, same dot, same everything. But, to cut a long story short, we bought a litho company anyway. After that, no one asked if an outdoor job was printed litho or screen. In truth, though, we printed most of them litho because it was cheaper.

Is that the same today? Is how you produce a job – screen, litho or digital – pretty much up to you?

Oh yes.

But some things must have changed in the industry in the best part of 50 years?

The big difference technology-wise now is having to have multiple processes under one roof. But probably the biggest change is from the client side; it’s having an integrated solution. Now, a typical client will say ‘I want to promote this’ and then we would work with them on the look and feel of the promotion, on selecting the stores and the offer point. We might also do the photography, create the artwork, printing it, packing it, putting it in store – and doing all of that in three days! Gone are the days when we would just print a job and move onto the next one. We’ve evolved into full-service providers, because of the needs of our clients.

Have you ever stopped evolving as a business?

The only thing that has stayed constant is the type of client we predominantly work for – retailers or brand owners. Using different methods to print, as technologies evolve, is just incidental. I’m not sure that’s going to be the same going forward.

How do you mean?

Our growth has been in servicing a particular industry, but if I think of the areas of growth in the future, I don’t think that’s going to be restricted to more of the same. I think we need to look at different areas of business, perhaps even some that don’t exist yet. So we will, perhaps, be less about B2B and more about B2C in the future.

Do you mean wide-format printers generally or Augustus Martin?

The whole sector.

Is that because you think POS clients are under threat from online retailers?

No, not at all. Look, all businesses are under threat one way or another, it’s just a question of how you handle that threat. Some retailers might invest more in their window displays to get shoppers through the door, say. Every product has a lifecycle. IBM used to make typewriters, but typewriters don’t exist anymore – something similar does though. There used to be a whole industry out there of typesetters, but they don’t exist anymore.

Is print coming to the end of its cycle?

Who knows. Perhaps one day there might be an end to all types of print. The question is how long will it take for them to disappear and will they ever truly completely disappear? Yes, there will be a contraction and more consolidation. But I think it’s more about the market shifting, rather than dying. What we need to think about is not just focusing on one market with our solutions, but starting to look at other markets where our solutions, technologies and products might fit – because it might not be that they necessarily fit with our clients of today for ever.

How do you mean?

As a digital or screen printer you print on any substrate from wood, metal and glass to carpet, tiles, fabrics – anything you want. That’s where the growth will be: printing on caravans, cookers, chairs – whatever you want. There are so many items that can be economically personalised now. So the world is our oyster.

So these are the new markets that don’t exist yet?

Oh, they exist, we just haven’t exploited them yet. Look, photobooks didn’t exist a decade ago, now there’s a massive market and it’s saturated. I’m sure there are people out there that look at their home and think ‘I wish I had a surround on my TV that wasn’t plain’ or ‘I wish that door was chrome instead of wood or had a picture of my mother-in-law from the back on it – so it looked like she was always leaving’. There are all sorts of potential products we haven’t even thought of.

How could someone keep track of all those opportunities, though, and make sure they identify the ones they could make a living out of?

It’s old-fashioned business sense. If you’ve got a good product, then market that product. If you have a product that people want, whatever it is, then specialise in it. If you can make personalised coffee percolators or curtains really well, then do that – do one thing really well. You don’t have to do the whole gamut from day one. Keep it simple. No successful company has started by doing 50 products, they all started with one or two and then maybe added to them over time.

But then is it easier for small start-ups to seize those opportunities than say a £50m business like yours? Because you need to look at things that are scalable.

I’m not talking about me or Augustus Martin, I just mean firms generally. But I wouldn’t necessarily think from day one I had to make it scalable; that can evolve. If you look at Vistaprint or Pixart they started by doing very small volumes of print. If you’ve got a good idea and you’re good at what you do, then anything is possible. The only problem is marketing the products, but that’s not a good enough reason to not give them a go.

Well, if you look at how you started – the lampshades – it almost sounds as if you wish you were back in those days: just starting up.

No, I don’t. But if I were producing lampshades now, I would be doing it very differently. Mass customisation is still only just starting to be exploited.

You think that’s the biggest opportunity in wide-format?

It’s definitely one of them. And it’s not a small market, you could have an order for 20,000 personalised... I don’t know... toilet seats, and you can make a profit of £12.50 on each one – that’s a quarter of a million pounds worth of business. 

Sounds like you still get excited about the possibilities of print?

I do. There are some tremendous opportunities out there.

How do you identify them for your business then?

I’m not going to tell you that.

But going back to your earlier point, 10 years ago, Vistaprint barely existed and today it’s a billion-dollar business. There were probably companies much bigger than it at the time it moved into web-to-print, companies that were richer and better placed to exploit the opportunity, but didn’t because their size held them back. So doesn’t it make sense that smaller, more agile firms are more likely to seize the opportunities?

They didn’t just appear out of the ether, many of the companies that have seized one opportunity or another had been around for years. Yes, some were born out of their markets or ideas, but not all. The whole thing is: just do it. It’s no easier or harder for small or large businesses – they both face challenges, they’re just different challenges.

We spoke about the industry evolving earlier, do you think it’s also got more professional?

Absolutely. I actually think that print managers, in the wide-format world at least, have made printers more professional. You can have two results from working with a print manager: you can dumb down and not question anything and just do what you’re told, or you help the print manager by learning to be like them and offer the other services that they need – all of the things outside of print. That’s why all of the larger printers have adopted a much broader approach to working with their clients, whether it’s direct or through print management.

What are your thoughts on print managers generally?

We treat them like a normal customer, we try to develop a partnership. In fact for the majority of them we do a lot more than just print. We just give them our price, and if they don’t want to pay that, if they just want to drive our price down, then we’re happy for them to place it elsewhere. You can’t just keep driving the price down and not offering any innovation. You can make something more cost-effective, more impactful, offer a higher ROI. To be fair a lot of print managers understand that.

It’s about communication then. With your Fespa hat on for a minute, do you think that the industry talks enough?

That’s where Fespa is very good: peer-to-peer networking. The individual associations themselves offer great national networks, and for those wanting to take things to an international level, the Fespa exhibitions come into their own.

Is Fespa more of an exhibition organiser than a trade association (of trade associations)?

I think it’s both. The whole point of Fespa is that it’s not for profit; it’s for the industry. Obviously, the exhibition side makes profits, but they go directly into the industry via either partner committees, made up of Fespa exhibitors, or the member associations on the other side. And there we pour money into them to help improve the industry’s lot at the grass roots level. No individuals gain out of Fespa, but the industry as a whole does.

What are the key objective of your presidency?

To let people know that the sky is the limit.

Looking back though, what are your personal highlights?

Being asked to be Fespa president twice. Running Augustus Martin isn’t a bad job either. In fact, sometimes I look around and wonder ‘wow, how did we manage to build that’. Because if you thought about two men, putting £2 in the bank and then 50 years later having a £50m business, it is incredible. Although to be fair, we’re not what you could call an overnight success.

Do you ever stop learning?

I don’t think you do. We see products all the time that are interesting. You can always improve what you do.

Do you think that in terms of technology that all of the revolutions have happened and now it’s just small evolutions?

No, I think there are some big changes coming. I honestly do. We’re not what I consider a high-tech industry in some ways. If you look at inkjet, it’s as far away from printing as you can get as a technology. All other forms of print you can do by hand. Where’s it come from – that you can put down thousands of drops of ink in a split second in a precise pattern, in order? It’s incredible. I think there will be many things that are perhaps being used in other industries that will come to bear on print that will have just as big an impact in the future.

Are you still a screen printer at heart though?

I haven’t been a screen printer for 25 years. We use so many different technologies; in fact we use some that weren’t even designed for POS that we managed to find a use for. But I guess at some level, yes, I’ll always be a screen printer. 

Any lowlights?

Well, we’ve lost customers through no fault of our own at different points in our history, but then we’ve won others – that’s just life. There have occasionally been downturns in business, but we’ve survived and I think that’s because we’ve been very prudent and never lived beyond our means.

That’s interesting, because you’re a high-profile poker player…

…I wouldn’t say I’m high-profile.

Well, you have played in big televised games. But do you have different approaches to poker and business?

Oh no, I play poker like I do business. Everything’s a risk and I’m always all in. I’m joking. I would liken poker to going on the stock market: at the end of the day you have to be prepared to lose. But in business you must never be prepared to lose – you’ve got to be certain of what you’re doing and make sure that what you’re doing is right for the business and the staff – you can’t take risks with people’s livelihoods.