The Reel Envelope Company has been established by and is part of The Envelope Works Group, in Earby, Lancashire which also owns Ace Envelopes in London, both envelope overprinters.
The new company prints reel-to-reel on two five-colour Muller Martini NT litho web presses, before manufacturing the envelopes from the printed matter on a W&D 102 rotary envelope machine. The Martini NTs take 530mm-wide jumbo reels and feature custom-built cylinders to enable C5 envelope production.
The company has also secured GMG Fogra colour management certification, which it is promoting as its unique selling point. Using reel-to-reel litho will also enable the company to print envelopes with full ink coverage, something it believes there is growing demand for.
At 3,000sqm The Reel Envelope Company’s new facility is more than twice the size of that of The Envelope Works, and chief executive Mark Farrimond thinks it will be printing and manufacturing 25m envelopes per month once it gets going.
The facility, in a former mattress factory that had stood empty for eight years, opened for business on Monday. It took “a considerable amount of money to bring it up to standard”, Farrimond said.
The company is renting the building for the first five years after which it plans to buy the property. It has 16 staff, with a plan to grow to 60 or even 70 in the next five years “if everything goes to plan,” Farrimond said.
“We hope to produce 25m envelopes a month on the one machine. We’re the only envelope company doing both printing and converting under one roof and we’re the only company that’s GMG certified. We’ll be printing to Fogra standards.
“The response so far has been fantastic. Everyone has been blown away by the appearance and the size of the factory. We’re hoping that within the next five or six years we can be turning over £15m or £20m, just from the new site.” The Envelope Works currently turns over £5m.
Farrimond said The Reel Envelope Company was only the second reel-to-reel envelope operation in the UK.
He and The Envelope Works co-owner Simon Holdings PLC created The Reel Envelope Company after The Envelope Works gained 400 new customers since January 2014. New managing director Trevor Whittaker is a shareholder in the company he will now run. The new company is backed by a £1m investment from The Envelope Works, HSBC finance and a grant from the Lancashire Regeneration Fund.
Farrimond said: “We’ve found it very difficult to get the quality service and products since gaining the extra work. We’ve had to walk away from business, which we didn’t like to do. We said we need to be in a position where our destiny was in our own hands.”
While envelope manufacturing is in decline, Farrimond said the company expects to pick up market share. Farrimond said: "We don’t want to become another envelope company producing plain envelopes or very cheap flexo-printed ones. This side of the business has got smaller, but people are spending more money in making envelopes colourful or special so they can strike home more, and there’s more money in it. We want to be known as the biggest and the best in the marketplace, but ultimately we’re interested in making money.”
The new business will be headed up by Whittaker, who has previously worked at Heritage Envelopes and Great British Envelopes. Meanwhile, John Humphreys and Adrian Ninian join from 3M Securities as production manager and press operator respectively. Only four of the 16 new staff are from Reel’s sister companies.
The factory is running around the clock with three shifts seven days a week.
The Envelope Works has 3000 active customers and 7000 prospects, from blue-chip clients to print management companies, and mailing shops down to one-man bands.
