The Barton Hill, Bristol-based commercial printer took delivery of the new 110ppm Ricoh device last month. As well as increasing the firm’s digital capacity and efficiency, one of the main investment drivers was the machine’s ability to handle and automatically duplex sheets up to 700mm long.
“The sheet size is quite significant for us because there were just a few jobs that we couldn’t fulfil ourselves before and we don’t like to say no to customers. This keeps all that work in-house and we can now keep control of it all,” said marketing manager Lucy Bendon.
The Ricoh device joins a Konica Minolta bizhub Press C1085, Roland DG and Canon large-format printers and three Heidelberg litho presses – a B2 CD 74 five-colour perfector, a B3 Speedmaster 52 two-colour press and an SRA3 GTO 46. The company also operates a large fleet of finishing kit.
The firm celebrated its 40th birthday with a team-building day in Conham Woods earlier this week.
Over the coming weeks it will plant 40 trees in local schools and green spaces in partnership with the Forest of Avon Trust, a green charity the firm has supported since 2007, which helps to protect, plant and manage woodlands in Bristol, Gloucestershire and Somerset.
Whitehall Printing joint managing director Joe Bendon, who has run the company with brother Adam Bendon since taking over leadership from their father 10 years ago, said: “My brother and I have always put sustainability at the heart of our operation. We have children and want to know that our impact on Bristol is good for the city, both commercially and environmentally.
“Printing has experienced a rough ride in recent years but there is growing awareness of sustainable paper manufacturing. As we celebrate our 40th year, there seems to be strong demand for the tactile value/authenticity of paper products that is lacking in the digital world. This demand has rapidly increased new forest expansion across Europe – which we are proud to support – but we also want to see more trees in Bristol.”
Whitehall, which operates from a low-energy 743sqm facility, is both FSC and ISO 14001:2008 certified.
The firm, which has a dedicated calendars arm called Team Calendars, serves local councils, universities and charities as well as regional and national businesses. It has a turnover of £2.1m – up 17.5% year-on-year – and 22 staff and is planning to take on apprentices in the near future.
“Our ethos has always been to remain highly adaptable to the marketplace and not to resist change, but to look for opportunities,” said Lucy Bendon.
“We’ve been quite lucky in some of the calls and decisions we’ve made, in particular by going strongly into web-to-print solutions – our big clients use web-to-print portals that we provide.
“We’ve also invested quite heavily in an e-commerce solution on the website on over 100 products and we will continue to expand that range and make it really easy for people to manage their artwork and all of their projects simultaneously online, wherever they are in the world.”
The company has been shortlisted in two categories at the 2017 Bristol Post Business Awards – Family Business of the Year and Small Business of the Year.
