But its sole director is hoping to revive his fortunes with a side-project.
The Camberley company, which offered digital, litho, large-format and direct-to-substrate printing as well as design for print, web and promotional merchandise, shut its doors shortly after printing all of the Canon Océ Arizona samples for Fespa 2015 in May for design agency Chaos.
It appointed Ninos Koumettou of the accountant, corporate recovery and insolvency specialist Alexander Lawson Jacobs in Winchmore Hill, north London, at the end of May.
Meanwhile its former website, www.digitalprintzone.co.uk, now redirects to a company trading as AC Media, which is registered at the address formerly used by Digital Print Zone and has similar graphics. AC Media Inc Ltd was established in January 2012 by DPZ’s sole director Alistair Buckman and Christopher Hope as a side-project to design website templates, one of which was the AC Media site, which secured print work to feed through to DPZ.
Buckman said this is the reason the website, which existed before the liquidation, is still connected to DPZ’s URL and has some old and now-inaccurate information left on it, including mention of 15 employees. The company offers the same range of services as DPZ as a print broker only and also has a number of websites in development.
Buckman said he decided to put DPZ into liquidation a matter of days before it would have become insolvent, after being hit with the double whammy of Paperlinx UK operations going into administration and the unexpected withdrawal of an investor.
After building up the business for from a £20,000 sole trader operation with aged equipment to a business turning over £750,000 in five years in October 2014, Buckman sold 60% of his shares at a nominal sum to investor Milind Purushottam Kangle in return for an initial £130,000 investment, plus a £12,000-£15,000 monthly subsidy to help grow his company faster. Buckman became a salaried director.
“We had a quite aggressive growth plan and wanted to reach £2m in turnover,” Buckman told PrintWeek.
In March, Kangle’s biggest project, a catering company, lost its biggest contract and half its turnover and he pulled his investment to prop up the catering company. Buckman immediately began cutting costs.
“We had to make two people redundant in March. Unfortunately within two weeks we were notified of Paperlinx going under. They were our main supplier for pretty much everything, from masking tape to large-format rolls. We would’ve probably managed to get by with just the investor pulling out or the supplier issue but not both.”
Buckman said alternative suppliers were inundated with requests for credit lines. “We were an on-demand digital company and we never held a lot of stock. We had to buy everything up front for six weeks and that ruined our cashflow.”
He said he helped his eight staff find jobs with other print companies and would feed work won through AC Media to them in the knowledge that their work would be top quality.
For more see the next issue of PrintWeek.
