The substrate supplier signed an agreement with administrators Deloitte to operate under licence at Moulton Park, Paperlinx's UK head office and the former headquarters of Robert Horne, to allow it time to find new premises. That agreement was subsequently extended until the end of this year.  

Vink Holdings’ purchase of the division called Visual Technology Solutions (VTS) under its former ownership, included all of Moulton Park’s converting equipment, which is in the process of being moved to two new warehouses.

Europoint moved into a new 3,700sqm warehouse in Trafford Park, Manchester three weeks ago and will be moving into a Brackmills, Northampton site of the same size in three weeks time. Both properties, on lease, have been refurbished and set up to suit the company’s operations.

Now the business is looking for a third location, a sales office with warehouse and conversion facilities, in Glasgow, where a sales team has been operating from managed offices for the past six months. The Glasgow move is expected to complete in Q1 next year.

Europoint also completed the migration of its systems to the Vink IT platform last month.

The process has been driven by managing director Frank Moran, Paperlinx VTS's former managing director, who has spent years building up the business and the past six months working to build it anew.

“We were a market leader, we were an £80m division. We were part of Paperlinx but what happened shouldn’t have happened to a division like we had at VTS.

“We felt angry, but I always believed something would happen, I thought someone would salvage the business. We had six locations before so although we are much smaller now we are comfortably ahead of where we expected to be."

From just 20 staff who had been left as a wind-down team at Moulton Park, Moran re-hired the former colleagues who had not joined the competition and Europoint was back trading by the end of April and out of the market only around a month.

But Moran said that a month is a long time in business.

“The whole market landscape changed in April,” Moran said. “Some of our competitors became distributors of products they haven’t sold before. The market has seen a great deal of change. It took most of May before we had any real traction.

"We lost our sales force, we had no logistics. We had to quickly put together a matrix of third-party logistics providers. We lost 80% of our workforce overnight. I was hugely relieved that Vink bought the division and the last six months have been a rollercoaster really but suppliers, customers and of course the Europoint staff have all been fantastic."

Looking forward the company’s priority is to regain market confidence and its former customer base. It will focus on POS, signage, wide-format digital and sheet plastics, a strong growth area, Moran said. He plans to also have a southern England base in the latter half of 2016.

"It’s about offering our customers a good service from the people they dealt with before. We have almost all the same brands but paper and board will not be core to our offering. We will not be selling equipment, inks or LEDs," said Moran.

“At the end of the day we had to do it because these were the cards that we were dealt.”