The deal was signed three weeks ago after a successful 14-week trial during which the magazine was printed at Circle’s Hélio Charleroi site in Belgium, after Polestar Sheffield’s gravure site, where the title was previously printed, was officially closed down.
The contract will last for three years, with a review after two. CirclePrinters sales director David Gray was unable to reveal how much the deal was worth but said he was delighted to have won the contract.
Gray said: “We are very happy to have secured the work on a long-term deal. It is a good footing for us in demonstrating that the UK market can be serviced to time-sensitive weekly production from the continent and is a good test case to talk to other customers about producing work outside the UK.
“The talks did not go on for a long time but the last 14 weeks have been about testing how robust the scheduling was. It’s been a successful period and given Hello! the confidence to sign up for a longer-term agreement."
Hello! associate publisher Roger Williams said: "Bearing in mind the normal situation, when you are looking at changing something as significant as your printer you would probably take quite a few months to trial things and take sample copies. We had a fraction of that time.
“The trial has gone really, really well. After the first four issues we gave them, which included the Queen’s 90th birthday special, we feel they really passed the test. Market Force, the distribution company that we use, has also been very good.
“We had no choice in the UK but we did talk to other printers in Europe. It came down to a combination of the ability for a printer to print the magazine, most importantly the cover, being gravure, and obviously logistics.”
The magazines are transported from the Charleroi site north and through the Channel Tunnel to a depot in Dunstable late on a Saturday. The journey takes approximately nine hours and they arrive on a Sunday morning and are then forwarded onwards for distribution to reach newsstands on Monday morning.
Williams said that Market Force had so far not encountered any disruptions to its service as a result of the migrant situation at Calais, however he added that going forward there could be issues and that the situation is "very much on their minds".
Hello! generally runs to 112pp plus covers and the print run is approximately 400,000.
The latest ABC results put its UK circulation at 253,253 (including 5,333 digital) for the year to June 2016. It retails at £2.
When it was printed at Sheffield, it was printed on a tight schedule over the weekend with 40% of copies on the shelves in and around London on Monday and the remainder distributed across the rest of the country on Tuesday.
With headquarters in the Netherlands, CirclePrinters Group refers to itself as being one of the largest independent graphic and pre-media companies in Europe. It mainly prints commercial retail work for the UK, with most of its larger contracts being with companies in France and Belgium.
It has more than 1,500 employees operating from 13 sites across Europe, six industrial sites and six sales offices, with one of the sales offices in London.
