How continual reinvention has taken photographer turned marketing and PR guru Noel Palmer on a journey that now sees him as MD of large-format print producer PPS.
Reinvention isn’t just a watchword to Noel Palmer, it’s a way of life. It’s an ability that has seen the one time photographer for Rolls Royce, move into marketing and PR and form Palmer Publicity Services (PPS) at the tail end of the ‘80s, to turning the company into a print business where wide-format has gradually become the mainstay.
“People can pigeonhole you just because of what you’ve previously done. I’ve learned that you can continually change and that it’s imperative to make sure you continually market yourself to your customers,” says Palmer, noting with a wry smile that as an ex-marketing man he would say that! But his marketing background has stood him in good stead over the years as PPS has moved in and out of various marketplaces.
The Preston-based company, which now has eight full-time staff, turned over £730,000 last year with what Palmer describes as “good margins”. He expects an eight percent rise in turnover this year, with around 70% coming from wide-format print (the rest being in design, litho etc). That’s quite a different format from the company’s starting point in 1989 when he and his wife Lesley set-up PPS as a PR and photography business in their front room before moving into an office above her dad’s furniture store in Preston a year later. Both had worked in the automotive industry, Noel as a photographer come marketing specialist and Lesley as PA to the managing director of sports car manufacturer TVR where Noel ended up as marketing director.
“I started getting bored and wanted to work for myself so set up PPS to service the automotive trade with PR and marketing services,” explains Palmer. Other types of work started coming in and by 1993 we had got into doing work for schools doing marketing, photography, brochure design etc – but with someone else doing the print. We also had a customer in the house building trade who would use us for marketing and I noticed that in the sales cabin there were black and white sales plans with coloured Lettraset showing particular plots. A local printer had put in a Rastergraphics printer so we started working with them and produced some of the first A1 framed coloured prints, which at that time sold for £500 each. The customer loved them and we realised print was a game to get into. That was our crossroads,” says Palmer.
Having moved PPS into the top floor of the family home in 1994 it now had a bit of space to expand so in 1996 the Palmers took a leap of faith and bought a 36in Encad printer and laminator and started producing wide-format colour prints. Within the first year of the machine’s operation print still only accounted for about five percent of PPS’s turnover but its profit making potential prompted the purchase of a second 36in Encad in 1998. “By then we’d moved production into our big garage so we also had room to buy a 60in Encad and 60in laminator a year later,” explains Palmer, who by this time was taking on staff in the form of a dedicated designer and designer/production person.
“PR was trailing off by this point and print was about 30% of turnover and we wanted to move more in that direction but just didn’t have the room, especially for finishing, so in 2000 we moved to the ground floor of a design agency in Preston, from whom we got work!” It was a move that provided PPS with the opportunity to buy a 60in, eight-colour Encad 850i, which proved a bit of a disaster, before switching to a HP5000 in 2002.
“The thing was, people started asking us about outdoor print so in 2003 we bought our first solvent machine, a 74in Grenadier 1900, and started producing signage. What a learning curve that was, printing onto vinyl which no one-had told us we had to gas-off before finishing!”
And that wasn’t the only problem. “By now about 35% of our customers were design agencies, which was great for turnover but not so great for margin. Plus they wanted everything yesterday and then took ages to pay. We realised we needed to actively change customer focus. So we decided we’d become more of a one-stop shop that could handle everything from design through production to fitting. By the time we bought an Agfa Anapurna flatbed in 2008 that’s what we’d become.” But it had been something of a winding path.
In 2005 PPS had moved operations from the design agency site to a unit on the business estate where it has its present premises. By this time wide-format print was about 60% of turnover, “but people were selling basic banner products for next to nothing” says Palmer. So as reinvention man, Palmer considered getting into print hardware and consumables sales.
“In 2006 we went to China and saw about 20 companies. We started bringing pop-ups into the UK with the intention of using them ourselves but also distributing them. But then the price wars started and the price of pop-ups here plummeted. And we realised that to stock consumables we’d need a massive warehouse, so we forgot that. We decided just to bring in hardware such as slim line roller banner products, literature stands etc. But we’d also seen a flatbed printer that Techwin produced so we thought we’d try and sell that here.
“We told Techwin we’d show the machine at Sign and Digital but it only arrived the day before the show and we never even got it working at the event. We spent a lot on the idea, having sent out a guy to be trained on the printer etc, and it just didn’t come to anything – it wasn’t one of our better ideas! But, we saw the value in printing on a flatbed. Much roll-to-roll print was just becoming too price competitive so this was another big refocus time for us and in 2008 we moved into our current site and bought the Anapurna.”
That has proved yet another changing point for PPS. “There are lots of big print companies and men in garages. We fall in the middle and can’t afford to compete on massive volume at very low cost, or exist on one-off banners. So we decided a while back now that we needed to go after higher margin work, such as printing onto metal, acrylic, wooden tabletops… The flatbed enables us to do that. We even produce labels on it. Sounds odd but we have a customer who produces hundreds of thousands of labels, but sometimes wants 500 by the next day. We put those on the flatbed overnight. They need them immediately so they don’t care about price and we can charge a premium.”
Nowadays 98% of PPS’s customers are end users. It has two or three London agencies still on the books “who aren’t looking for a cheap deal and will pay for good service,” stresses Palmer. “About 30% of the jobs we take on have artwork supplied – usually those from the bigger customers. For the rest we tend to provide the design capability which is what we like. It’s where we can make money – and it ties them to us in a way. The artwork is actually theirs, but they know we’ve produced it so they come back to us.”
Going forward it’s the specialist print and signage markets that are in PPS’s sights. “Schools are a good target because we already deal with them and can engage with them quite easily,” explains Palmer. “We have plenty of case studies and printed examples to show people our capability – they’re key to marketing the business.” With his background, he should know.