Adam Carnell (left) and James Kinsella

Bluetree is a print group that has experienced incredible growth over the last six years through its Bluetree, InstantPrint and RouteOne brands. Xerox reseller Zerographic has been a valued partner along the way.

Next time some pesky students come by wanting to purchase a few posters for an event they are putting on at university, be very careful – they may just open up a print shop in competition with you!

James Kinsella and Adam Carnell have been best friends since they were aged 13. They are now 27 and oversee a print group – Bluetree – which employs 158 people. ‘We’ve always worked on lots of different things,’ explained Mr Carnell, ‘selling phones to school mates, running club nights at Uni in Bristol…that really took us into print, getting wide format poster prints. We knew we would have to get a proper job when we left Uni. We brainstormed ideas while studying and had five or six ideas and this one came out top. We saw Vistaprint was growing, saw people operating in the web to print arena, and thought there was an opportunity there.’

The two friends set up an online shop in 2009 and took their first employee on in the summer of 2010. ‘The idea was to try to make print procurement as easy as possible for different types of customers. A lot of smaller micro businesses are getting increasingly comfortable with buying things online. It was our time in Bristol that made us think there had to be a better way of doing it. We had a graphic designer in Leeds sending the job to a printer on the other side of Bristol, and then driving down to collect it two or three days later.’

With some understatement, they say it has ‘gone okay and we think there is potential’. Bluetree Group consists of InstantPrint, an online shop for micro businesses, Bluetree, a POS printer focused on large print management and retail campaigns, which merged with InstantPrint in 2012, and RouteOne Print, which started in 2013 and is a trade print service operating online. RouteOne has developed following the discovery that many trade customers were buying print on ebay. ‘We thought, if that’s happening then there is something wrong in the market, which is an opportunity,’ said Mr Kinsella.

(XHEAD)                  Through the gears

The swift growth of these businesses has been assisted by an equally swift move through the gears of digital printing technology, much of which has been in partnership with the Xerox reseller Zerographic, based in Stafford, with offices in Wakefield and Weston-super-Mare. InstantPrint had started in 2009 with a small OKI printer, but as it grew the two friends knew they needed to take a step up. Having identified Xerox’s 5000, 7000 and 8000 series machines as being a good fit, they set about finding a second hand press.

‘It was almost pot luck that Zerographic had a machine that fitted our requirements perfectly,’ Mr Kinsella recalled. ‘We met them and quickly realised that they were a partner for us in the long term. Their support and tenacity in getting the deals through with Xerox – they have really tried to understand us and how we operate as a business.’

The Xerox 7000 went in in November 2010, and he says it was ‘a bit of a whirlwind for us after that’. ‘It probably took us a couple of months to get our heads around it. It was in a totally different league to the machine we were moving up from. Within a couple of months we started selling flyers online based on producing them off the Xerox, and then suddenly we were working extended days every week, 6 am until 8 pm.’

Since then the group has invested in a Xerox 8000, a DocuColor 250, and a Xerox 5000, the latter two of which have now been replaced with an iGen at the end of 2011, and a second at the end of 2013. While the Xerox 7000 and 8000 presses have been kept as a back-up, the print finish is very different to an iGen, with a shiny, oily look compared to the iGen’s flat, litho-like print. The iGens also have better colour consistency across the sheet with the inline spectrophotometer.

The two friends attribute their success to being lucky enough to enter the industry at a time when many companies were looking to save money by procuring print online, but this is backed up by a commitment to customer service. ‘A lot of companies talk about being customer-centric,’ said Adam Carnell, ‘but it’s easy to talk about and difficult to do. What James and others here have achieved is to live and breathe that.’