The firm’s new 929sqm leased premises, which it moved into in December, is on the same Colchester trading estate as its previous 372sqm leased unit.
The 16-staff company distributes a range of pre-press, digital and screen consumables to both large and small printers. These include inks, coatings, washes and sealers from manufacturers including Huber Group, Sun Chemical, Canon, Pantone and Kinyo.
“The business has been growing and we’ve been putting quite a bit of investment in the company of late – in our ink manufacturing, spot colour and colour matching facilities – so logically it made sense to look for something bigger,” said head of operations Paul Ogden.
“We’ve also been working closely with some of our key supply partners, like Huber Group, and we’ve picked up some more accounts in our area that we’ve looked after on behalf of Huber as it made more sense for them to have a distributor that could colour match in the area.”
To enable it to manufacture special colours, the business has built a larger colour lab within the new unit, invested in additional colour matching equipment and taken on two experienced colour matchers.
“That in itself has brought more business to us because if you do a few mixes for a company it’s a foot in the door. It has generated interest from many customers in the additional products and services we can provide,” said Ogden.
“Colour matching is something a lot of distributors have been involved in over the years, but we didn’t think many of them had really made the right investment in that area. Since we’ve done that we’ve gone from just doing a handful of mixes a day to turning over about two tonnes of colour matching a month.”
The company, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, is looking to take on more new staff and invest in additional equipment for its colour lab during 2016.
Ogden said: “We’ve already seen improved logistics and it’s meant that we can stock more products and not have deliveries coming in every five minutes, which means we can improve our service to customers. We can now offer a one-stop shop where customers can come to us for all their pressroom requirements.”
