The business, part of the Adare Group, was awarded the contract following a tender process and will now be tasked with delivering high-value, cross-channel communications in both print and electronic formats to Domestic & General’s customers.
Domestic & General provides appliance care services and comprehensive product protection for a number of high-street white goods brands, protecting more than 22 million appliances.
Adare SEC’s technology will be integrated into Domestic & General’s business to enable the end-to-end management and highly secure distribution of agreements and renewals, essential mailing and customer correspondence, in a fully auditable way.
The business will handle around 39 million items of either printed or email communications annually – including up to 30 million paper documents – although Adare SEC said the aim is to understand each customer’s preferred channel of communication in order to offer the best service.
Adare SEC sales director Martyn Viquerat told PrintWeek: “We’ve continued to expand and take on additional staff to cope with the organic growth from the numerous contracts we’ve secured over the past few years.
“It’s the investment we’ve made in GMC and Ricoh technology that’s allowed us to develop the solutions within that technology to attract the likes of Domestic & General.”
He added: “They want to move as much to full-colour and multi-channel as possible and one of the drivers of that is the Adare SmartEdit technology. They also want to take up the use of our electronic storage archive solutions.”
Domestic & General UK managing director Dean Keeling said: “Our purpose is to take the worry out of breakdowns for our customers. To do so, it’s vital that we have a trusted and reliable communications partner.
“Adare SEC was able to provide us with a high-quality and agile, technology-led solution, which does exactly what we were looking for. What’s more, Adare SEC is able to get things done efficiently, without compromising on service, something which is extremely important when working with UK brand leaders.”
Adare SEC is currently in the process of installing two new Ricoh VC60000 colour inkjet web presses at its Huddersfield site, which were signed for at Drupa and cost £3.3m. It has also just installed a bookletmaker from UK manufacturer Wilstead, along with a Dimuken foiling and numbering machine and a bespoke plastic card personalisation machine.
Meanwhile Adare Group has had a busy few months in terms of acquisitions. In July, it acquired Polestar Applied Solutions (PAS), which was one of the Polestar businesses that did not go into administration in April. Ten weeks earlier it acquired Banner Managed Communication (BMC) for an undisclosed sum.
Adare Group now employs around 1,100 staff across all of its operations and has a turnover of around £240m. Adare SEC, which has 540 staff, accounts for around £90m of the group’s turnover.
