Bryan Godwyn

Finishing equipment supplier IFS is seeing an upswing in its own and the market’s fortunes, with new premises on the one hand, and business confidence returning on the other.

Much negativity has been voiced in the industry around the reduced circumstances and scale of Ipex 2014, but for Intelligent Finishing Systems’ Bryan Godwyn the show was an important moment – both for his own company and for fellow post-press suppliers.

‘Ipex was massive for us, a fantastic event,’ he told Digital Printer. ‘It was a finishing show really, and it really opened up a lot of printers to the finishing process, to the problems and how they could be solved. I know all the finishing companies there had a very good event. That seemed to kick start the year. We started putting in bigger binding and folding lines and that seems to have carried on this year. People have been able to justify putting in perfect binding and the confidence has come back. It’s all about confidence really.’

The London exhibition in March 2014 seems to have been part of an overall up-turn that IFS has been experiencing in the market, with recovery reaching many parts of the UK, Mr Godwyn reports. Scotland, for example, so much in the vanguard of recent political events, has a print sector that is coming back to life, he said.

‘Scotland has been dead for a couple of years but just this last six months we have put in quite a few machines. Something has breathed life into Scotland, which is great because it was decimated. B1 was wiped out there and that went down into B2 and B3, but you can see a little more confidence coming through. I think it was coming through before the referendum. I think it’s just a general business confidence returning to the UK and it took a little longer to get to the North East of England and Scotland. It’s definitely happening now though.’

Mr Godwyn cites the impact of the Government’s Regional Growth Fund as being an important contributory factor in boosting parts of the country away from London and the South East, enabling businesses to invest in more efficient technology.

 

Hemel home

For his own company, things have been changing too. IFS moved from its Perivale premises last year and has settled nicely into a new site in Hemel Hempstead, with close links to the M1, M25 and A1(M). The comparison between the two locations is like chalk and cheese – it is possible to park the car in Hemel Hemsptead, for a start. It is a much smaller but more modern site, and is much better suited to IFS’ needs these days, with significantly reduced storage space and a more attractive if smaller showroom.

He continued: ‘For customers it’s a nicer environment. The whole experience of visiting us should be enjoyable, not stressing out on the M25, M1, M40 and then not being able to park the car. I think we have made a very good start and it’s definitely an enhancement on Perivale. We always knew that we had a window to leave Perivale when the lease was due to expire in 2014. We were there a long time – since the 1960s.’

One of the benefits of the Hemel Hempstead site is that it puts IFS in a much closer location to its Print Efficiently partner Apex Digital Graphics, which has hosted the event in recent years. In fact, the two companies are now just two doors away from other, because Apex itself has recently, and coincidentally it seems, switched its long-standing Hemel premises for one almost directly adjacent to IFS. Putting a Horizon binder close to a Ryobi or digital press will not require much transportation for future Print Efficiently events. Mr Godwyn said that despite the synergies and similar culture the two companies share, there has never been a discussion about a more formal relationship with Apex.

While IFS is best known for the Horizon agency, selling perfect binding, saddle stitching, folding and other systems throughout the UK, Mr Godwyn said that increasing numbers of customers are talking to the firm about continuous feed technology, for which it now offers Tecnau technology, while a largely undiscovered gem in its portfolio is the box folding/gluing/creasing technology of Italian manufacturer Petratto. ‘They are very innovative. They make things that we did not even think were possible,’ he says by way of explanation. It makes the technology difficult to advertise, since Petratto is nimble enough to be brought a problem and quickly develop, test and bring to market the solution.

‘We have got to try and find a way of letting people know that the solution is there, just bring us the problem,’ he concluded.