But time waits for no man, and certainly not for 1st Byte’s Lawrence Dalton, managing director of the 40-staff, £4m-turnover firm, who believes speed to market, speed in adopting new technology, a collaborative approach to business and being an all round nice guy have been the cornerstones of his success.

Darryl Danielli When did you start the business?

Lawrence Dalton 1996. Well, 1 January 1997 to be precise. That’s when we opened our doors with our Indigo, with myself, Tony [Anderson, production director] and Stuart [Williams, estimating and print director].

So your first machine was an Indigo?

Yes, Tony and Stuart spent two weeks in Maastricht, which was Indigo’s headquarters then, learning how to use it. The machine was delivered while they were away and I thought, ‘right, we may as well start running it then’. They were very nervous, but as far as I was concerned they had had two weeks on the machine so it would be fine, but they said that they hadn’t even touched the machine in the first week and were just schooled in the theoretical principles of digital printing. I thought, bloody hell, you’ve had two weeks to learn about it and you’re telling me you don’t know how to use it…

What model was it?

E-print 1000, I don’t think it was the very first one, but it was probably their first semi-serious one. In the first two or three years you couldn’t buy an Indigo, you had to buy two, but an engineer came in the box with them and stayed with you for a year.

Was that true or was that just a print urban myth?

Oh yes, it was a fact. We were one of the first people that were allowed to buy a single machine, but there was still an engineer very close by.

Back to the beginning, how did you get into print?

My grandfather started a printing company in 1918, making blocks. I joined it in the early 1970s and ran it until 1990. I went from the block-making side more into the typesetting side, so I spent my life in the 1970s buying and scrapping generation after generation of typesetting machines. It was kind of fun, but by 1990 typesetting had come to an end really…

And I guess digital print wasn’t quite there then?

No. So I joined the typesetting/repro company Tony was running [Photo Lettering Services (PLS)] that was owned by a marketing agency. Stuart came to work there as a scanner operator. So the three of us met and worked together there.

It’s interesting that so many of the early digital printers came from a typesetting/repro background, is that because you had an inherent understanding of colour?

Partly. But I think it was also because we were used to getting phone calls about a job at 9pm that had to be delivered by 6am the next day, so the concept of super-fast turnarounds held no fear for us. Whereas for the litho guys at the time that would have been a major cultural shift for their business.

So was it at PLS that the idea for 1st Byte was born?

Sort of, I was at Ipex in 1993 and that was when Indigo and Xeikon were both launched and they left an impression on me. They both seemed very clever; the quality wasn’t great at the time though.

Was that when you started thinking about setting up a digital business then?

Not quite. Around 1995, one of my clients was Chanel and I took the marketing director out for lunch, because we did the typesetting for their sales manuals that their reps took out around the country. We were just talking and I asked him how his daughter was getting on because she was doing a marketing degree and was working with Chanel at the time. And he said that she was giving him grief because he had asked her to clean out the store cupboard and she asked him how could they possibly throw out all of the thousands of beautifully printed manuals they had in there. The reason was simple: Chanel always wanted the best quality and printed them litho, and in truth the cost for producing 25 manuals would have been the same price as printing 500, so each quarter they had 475 more than they needed. She berated him for the waste and I think he was looking to me for support, but I actually said that there might be a solution because there was this new form of printing called digital that allowed you to print smaller quantities. So he asked me to take our artwork and get some test sheets made up.

You must have been slightly nervous of the quality back then?

The lucky thing was that all of their material was very high-quality photography, they never used tints and if there was type then it was either white on black or black on white paper. So I took them to Michael Burman at FE Burman, who I knew, and I asked him to run them on his new Indigo. And because they were good images with lots of movement and simple text I thought they looked fine and the client thought they looked great, nearly as good as litho and asked me: so what does this mean? I said well, it’s going to be cheaper, not a lot because it’s new technology, but it will quicker. So he said okay, let’s do it, because he was always chasing the latest ad campaigns from Paris or wherever, so a few extra days on the schedule would really help him.

I’m guessing it wasn’t quite as fast as you hoped though?

Well, I spoke to Michael and asked how long would it take for 25 copies of a hundred sheets and he said that the minimum was always three days. By my reckoning though it was only going to take a couple of hours to run. It turned out this was true, but the machine broke down all the time and Michael wouldn’t guarantee anything less than three days. So I spoke to the customer and he still thought that was fantastic, as he usually had to wait at least five days for litho, so he agreed.

And he remained happy with them?

Well, all through 1996 we sent them to Michael and he printed them, so yes, he must have been. I picked up some other digital work in that time too, which we placed with Michael and then after a while I talked to the owners of my business and said we needed to look at something new, digital print, as repro was disappearing, so they asked me to cost it out. So I did and it came it at around £500,000 and they laughed me out of court.

Was that when you started to look at going it alone?

Well, I started to talk to Indigo around then; I placed an ad in the Daily Mail, back in the days when it used to have a lot of print ads, saying that I was starting a digital print company in central London and if you were interested in investing or joining get in touch. I received quite a few letters, one of which was from Tony, who had left the business about a year before because he had fallen out with the owners. Because I hadn’t put my name on the ad, just a PO box number, he didn’t know it was me. I called him, we met up and Stuart, who had some experience of running a printing press, was also interested. So we went and spoke to numerous banks and they all said digital print was never going to happen, so we had to put more money down. Eventually, Barclays helped us, with some guarantees in place from my family. Then we started the business. We did it so bare bones to begin with. We had the Indigo, one Mac, one secondhand guillotine, which someone then pointed out was out of square, a desktop wire binder and perhaps an office stapler to share. 

It’s interesting that you started out in digital via placing work through someone else, because in some respects history repeated itself with you giving Moo and Moonpig their starts. How did they come about?

Well, Moonpig was literally a phone call out of the blue from Nick [Jenkins, founder of Moonpig] around 1998/99 saying that he had this idea and could he come and see me to talk about it. He wanted me to print individual sheets for greetings cards. He asked for a price per sheet and at that time it was a minimum charge of £25, so he asked what it would be if there were multiple orders every day, but they would vary from two sheets some days to 50 on others. After about six months, though, his business wasn’t really growing, and he said he was going to buy his own machine to drive growth, which I could understand. So we wished him luck and you could say he ended up doing very well.

What about your involvement with Moo?

Moo was a funny one, Richard [Moross] who founded the company is my daughter’s best friend. I first met Richard at the age of three when we would walk him to nursery and things like that. We went on holiday together and his family lived about three doors up from me. 

So there’s a lot of history then?

Well yes. Around 10 years ago he started working for a design agency; he was always a great talker, and I think they took him on to develop him as maybe a sales guy. He came to see me one day, though, and said that he really wanted a business card, but he was too far down the pecking order to have one. I think he really wanted one for when he met someone in a pub and he wanted to impress them basically, so I said that I would print him some. Around six months later he said that he liked them so much that he was going to leave the agency and start a business selling business cards and would I do the printing for him. So I agreed, I told him the price and he ummed and ahed and said that he wanted to sell a pack of cards for £10 and make some profit on that including delivery. With a standard-sized business card you get 21 on a sheet, but he needed more to make it viable, so, and I know it’s not rocket science, but it was still quite clever, he made the cards much narrower so that he could get 50 on a sheet and make the numbers stack up.

So they weren’t really business cards in the traditional sense then?

Well, actually, originally the company was called Pleasure Cards and he bought the pleasurecards.com domain name. Then when he launched he produced a lot of cards, for student leaders, magazine editors, people he felt were influential. He did some for my wife too because she runs her own business. But she immediately said: ‘Richard, do you expect me to hand out this card that says Pleasure Cards on the back, what would people think?’ So he took that to heart and bought the name moo.com instead.

Where did the name come from?

He said that Google and Yahoo have both got double os and his name was Moross – so there you go. And, of course, it’s short and memorable.

It took a while for the business to take off, though, if that was around a decade ago?

He really became successful when he struck a deal with a big photo agency around 2005. Anyway, they let him have a small button on their website offering 10 unique business cards with your own photographs on free of charge. He worked out that he could afford to do this for 1,000 people. Well he hit 1,000 after two hours. So we went from doing one batch for him every other day to doing 20 batches a day. I seem to remember that 70% of the photographers that had ordered the free cards re-ordered within a month and it just took off like wildfire in the photographic community. Up until he left us a couple of years ago, it grew exponentially. In fact, it got to the point when we couldn’t finish the jobs anymore. We printed, laminated and trimmed them, but he had to take on the packing. He ended up taking a unit across the road from us. He has been a fantastic success.

Did you help him when he decided to go it alone with the printing then?

He had some good investors, putting his talking skills to good use again. But the volumes were so high and we had pushed the price down as far as we could and were only making pennies per double-sided sheet and one of our Indigos was effectively running Moo work constantly. So in the end we told him to buy his own Indigos and we helped him to do that, we were quite happy to do that and we’re still friends. 

So you had a press to fill overnight then?

That was a bit of a problem, actually. So that was when we decided to build up our creative services arm, because I didn’t want to fill our presses with cheap, low-margin work if I could get some high-value work and that’s been our strategy ever since: to develop our high-end products and service. That’s where our Indigos are ideal and, of course, where our new Scodix and Sensory Printing comes in.

Has Richard been round to look at the Scodix yet?

No, but funnily enough Vistaprint has got five. Richard has a techie guy, who’s seen one. I think even Moonpig is interested. The problem is that if you sell on the internet people don’t really get what the Scodix can do; you need to put the product in people’s hands. We’ve only had it a few weeks, but given time, I’m sure I’ll talk to Richard about it. In fact, I would love him to get one because he still points clients in our direction if they want something that Moo doesn’t offer and if they’ve already seen what the Scodix can do, it’s an easy sell. That said, we did an e-shot to about 500 people on a database of a magazine’s website and we’ve already had about 150 replies – I think we had 60 in the first hour or so.

You’ve always been quite hot on marketing; has that always been important to you?

Yes, because we learned very early on that Indigo, as was, like most manufacturers, was never going to help us build a market for digital print. They just wanted to sell machines and had fairly tight marketing budgets themselves, so it was down to us. Fortunately, marketing our services is something we’re good at, probably better than most.

You talk about your cross-media marketing success, is that something you offer to clients?

No.

Is that because there’s no requirement from your clients?

I’m sure we could sell it, but we just don’t have the skill sets really. I know what Nick Green has done at Tangent and what other companies have achieved, and hats off to them. But my comfort zone is print.

Is cross-media something you might look at though, perhaps partnering with a cross-media agency to offer the service?

The great thing about what we do is that it’s very high-end, so it’s always going to be about keeping up with, or hopefully ahead of, the Joneses. My belief is that if we help our clients win business, then the other companies that don’t will look at what we’ve done for our clients and want to talk to us about what we can do for them.

So you just want to do what you and make sure you do it well?

Precisely. Print’s always going to be with us in one form or another and what we’re achieving here, the high-value, high-impact kind, is one of the types that will always be there: the tactile form of communication that, done right, can achieve better results than any other media.

But what do you see as the big threat to print then?

It’s still a tough market. And we will still lose volumes to the internet. By that I mean people placing jobs via the internet based on price, so we can’t show them what we can do and the value we can create. Fortunately, a lot of people that still specify print aren’t especially internet savvy, but as they’re replaced by the internet generation then that might get worse. We did find that we lost work last year because the person placing the work was a younger kid than five years ago and they shopped around online for the best price, not necessarily the best quality.

But you’ve started offering a web-to-print service haven’t you?

We wanted to respond, so we do that with our Quick Quote online platform. We’ve looked at everyone else’s platform and we’ve tried to make it simpler than even firms like Vistaprint. In truth, we’re never going to be the cheapest, but that’s not where we want to be either. We are competitive on price, but there is a limit – our core work is high-value, bespoke that is not so price sensitive.

What are the other opportunities for you then?

Sensory Printing. There has been an increasing demand for design too, and we’ve always fought shy of that. But I think the time is right to introduce a high-end layout service. So that’s an area we’ll look at soon. Then of course there’s always things like postal strikes. They’re good for business because they mean that people in London can’t get their jobs delivered and they come to us in a panic.

So you become their emergency service?

That’s always good; we always like to be the heroes.

What have been your highlights?

Creating and running 1st Byte of course, and the plaudits from clients. Being at the forefront of technology is fun too. I get great enjoyment from going to events like Drupa and Ipex.

Does technology still excite you?

Absolutely. Boys and their toys.

Is it the new applications that excite you though, rather than the technologies themselves?

Gone are the days when you bought a new press and the work just automatically flooded in. You have to get clients excited about the possibilities these new technologies can create. Marketing is key. I’m kicking myself that we didn’t start offering client seminars, like we did for Scodix last month, five years ago. They’re a great way to spread the word about what we can do. But we’re lucky as we’re very well known in our market for making the impossible possible.

But it must be a challenge to be one step ahead.

If you set your stall out as being innovators in digital print then you need to keep it up. It’s not always easy and it’s definitely not cheap.

What about the Landa presses? You were one of the people that paid a deposit at Drupa.

We’re keen to see what Benny will bring to the table. From my reading of it, at Drupa he was talking about a machine that can in theory bring you better quality than digital, or even offset can currently, and at a better price and speed than digital. I’m not really interested in faster speeds, but if the price of digital can be reduced to increase the market appeal and if the colour gamut of his nano inks can be wider than current digital then that would really be of interest. The only reservation I have is the size of them. Seeing the machines at Drupa, I thought these are big, but not as big as say the HP Indigo 10000, but he’s now announced that mechanically they’re going to be different than what he showed at Drupa and much bigger – that’s a concern. Space is not easy to come by in central London and we have to be here – location is key at our end of the market. 

But you haven’t given up on Benny?

We’re still very interested and I can’t wait to get the invite out to Israel to see what we’re talking about. It needs people to change things in the industry; Indigo did that and was a great company, as is HP Indigo, but they don’t have any real competitors.

So what’s next for you on the technology front?

Laser die-cutting is very exciting; clients are very interested. The Motioncutter, which I believe will be at Ipex, looks interesting and I think could be on the horizon for us.

To stay ahead of the curve, do you wait for clients to lead you to new technologies?

No, I think it’s up to us to see something new and realise the potential. Of course we talk to clients about it to make sure there’s a market.

So you don’t like taking gambles then?

Well our first Indigo in the 1990s was a gamble. I think six months in, all three of us sat around a table looking very gloomy because it kept breaking down and upsetting clients. On my mother’s side of the family we used to own a very famous West End fish restaurant called Sheekeys and I actually went to catering college before I joined my father’s print business. So I said, guys we’re called 1st Byte and we are in Soho, maybe we could throw the Indigo out the door and get frying tonight. I don’t think they laughed.

So, no regrets about choosing print?

No. I love it. I’ll keep at it until I get bored or fed up. Some days are great, some days not so great, but provided there are more great days then that’s fine. If I’m honest, I probably should have been a bit more ruthless, but that’s just not who I want to be. If you can’t have fun when it’s your business, what’s the point?