Cornwall-based pre-press specialist PH Media, PrintWeek's reigning SME of the Year, has set up the company along with Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire-based printer Crystal Press and Longcross, Surrey-based print manager Logical Connections. The three had been in talks for around a year.
All three companies have a pre-existing relationship, with PH managing director Ralph Wills and Logical Connections founder Greig Scott having worked together for more than a decade and Logical also carrying out print management work for Crystal Press, which is headed up by brothers Simon and Mark Kempster. MyLogicalGroup officially began trading in the last week and a website will soon be up.
The new multi-faceted service offered by MyLogicalGroup will not interfere with the three companies standalone operations, Wills said it was simply designed to formalise a previously informal partnerships to benefit clients.
The group will be jointly headed up by Wills, Scott and the two Kempsters. Newly appointed PH projects director Michael Madden will be in charge of liaising with the two other companies that are both based just outside of London.
Wills said: “From my perspective I wanted to be able to offer a full service for independents. That is what we are almost becoming synonymous with now; we are the go-to place for independents.
“It's nice for me to know that if tomorrow there are some very clever ideas for a magazine floating around, I can go and meet people and say ‘Now I’m able to look after you, from concept to delivery of the final magazine’.”
Wills will also soon be overseeing the launch of a new online magazine storefront, MyLogicalNewsstand.
11-staff PH contributes £800,000 in sales to the group and eight-staff Logical Connection contributes around £5.5m. Scott, who founded Logical Connections nine years ago, said MyLogicalGroup’s output would make up around 30% to 40% of his overall work. He is anticipating an extra £3m to £4m of sales next year with some “interesting projects coming up”.
Scott said: “This is something that I’ve wanted to do for quite some time and we’ve had fairly sensible discussions over the last 12 months.
“It seemed that every project we were working on there was the need for good front-end pre-press requirements. So the combination worked incredibly well and we found time to go for an end-to-end service, developed in the distribution arena for the independent magazine sector, which has grown more and more with the changes in the marketplace.”
Founded in 1986, Crystal Press, which describes itself as the “UK’s premier publication printer”, runs three B1 Komori presses, along with offering saddle stitching, PUR binding, sewing, case binding and lay-flat binding services.
Mark Kempster said: “It’s obviously very exciting. We are trying to offer something new to the market. Each company is not especially unique but together there is nobody out there offering end-to-end magazine publishing and printing to independent publishers.
“We’re not targeting the big publishers, we’re targeting the smaller independent publishers that might not have the internal expertise or experience to know how to create a magazine, print a magazine and distribute it to the right people.”
