Following the decision by PostNord Stralfors in mid-2015 to sell its subsidiaries in the UK and Poland, Cornwall-based Stralfors UK sought another backer, which came in the form of German investor group, Aurelius.
The highly acquisitive pan-European asset manager completed its acquisition of Stralfors UK on 1 September 2016, through its growth capital arm, and immediately rebranded the business as Imprimus.
Hot on the heels of the Stralfors deal, Aurelius this month completed its acquisition of Office Depot Europe, which has subsidiaries in the UK including Sidcup-headquartered, end-to-end managed print and creative marketing firm, Vital Communications.
The investor group has now announced a tie-up between its two new businesses, involving the cross-selling of products and services, that it claims will help them both to grow faster and create more value for customers of both companies.
“We started talking to people at Vital Communications because we could see real synergies between our companies. It’s a partnership to establish where we can take in the future,” said Imprimus managing director Tony Plummer.
“It’s about extending the sales offer to both sets of customers. We have hybrid mail solutions, for example, that Vital Communications don’t have and Vital Communications has its own concept design team and designs direct mail campaigns, for example, which we could use and then we can execute those designs. We can both benefit from the solutions and best practice in our areas.”
Plummer said that moving forward, Imprimus, which provides a range of print and electronic communications services including transactional and direct mail, would also benefit from Office Depot's nationwide logistics network.
“It’s about establishing quick wins and synergies where we can help each other develop sales by offering complementary services. That’s the key to the relationship,” he added.
Plummer said Imprimus and Vital customer bases, which cover a broad range of sectors such as finance, utilites, insurance and healthcare, would start to reap the benefits of the tie-up by the end of Q1 this year.
Imprimus turns over around £15m and employs 90 staff across its two sites: its headquarters in Redruth, Cornwall and a 3,300sqm site in Dartford, Kent. It runs a range of kit including and Océ Colorstream 3500 high speed colour inkjet devices, three Ricoh 9100s, which replaced older iGen machines, and a range of mono-inkjet printers.
Plummer said that since being bought by Aurelius, it had been business as usual at the firm.
He added: “We had no redundancies or restructuring – we’d done that a few years ago over a period of time. But since September it’s been all about growth."
Part of US office supply giant, Office Depot, the new Vital Communications brand was launched in the UK in March 2015. Its head office is in Sidcup, Kent and for broader coverage it uses Office Depot sites in Middlesex, Leicester, Ashton-under-Lyne, Crawley, Andover, East Kilbride, Dublin and Belfast. It employs around 85 people.
