For an industry in the throes of consolidation, it is refreshing to hear about a company that bucks the trend by growing organically in the face of lower overall print volumes and greater multimedia competition. The word “organically” is included because managing director Tony Dennington has built Colouration from the ground up, and growth has come through a steady influx of work – not through acquisition or ruthless cost cutting, which many larger companies have relied on for survival in the dog-eat-dog world of low-margin print.

“We started off eight years ago as a print facility,” says Dennington. “We had a Heidelberg DI, a small studio and some limited finishing equipment, and we worked for two or three cosmetics companies. So in a very small way, we started growing a business.”

Colouration has until now never felt a particular necessity to sell itself overtly. Dennington has on his desk a brochure, still in the proof-reading stage, which is the company’s first marketing venture beyond a website that by his own admission is “very basic”, offering little more than directions to the premises. The tagline on the new literature reads: “Welcome to the ever expanding world of Colouration – probably our clients’ best kept secret.”

Colouration has previously relied almost exclusively on word of mouth for generating new business leads. “What would typically happen,” says Dennington, “would be that a marketer within a marketing department of a company we’ve worked for would invariably move to another company in the same industry – another cosmetics company, or another fragrance house – and they would recommend us.”

Dennington says that working for clients in a high-end industry has been “a great learning curve” for a company expanding gradually with an ethos of quality work and customer service at its heart. These clients include big premium names including Clarins, Coty Group (which houses such fragrance brands as Calvin Klein, Davidoff and Vivienne Westwood) and Yves Saint Laurent. He adds: “They are very demanding on colour, very demanding on time constraints; a lot of it is promotional work and it has an on-counter date so we have to get it there on time.

“Colour consistency, flesh tones and product colour matches are all key to what they want and, like anybody, if you don’t give them what they want, they’ll soon find someone who is happy to take the work from you.”

Dennington is keenly aware of how important it is to please such meticulous customers, and he believes that it is the service offering of Colouration that is chiefly responsible for its success in these challenging economic conditions. “Printers have loads of reasons why something can’t look how it should,” he says. “We aim to make something look how the client wants it to look. We’ll wet proof a job and then laminate it, so what the client sees at proof is exactly the same as we’ll produce in a hundred thousand copies of it. There’s no misunderstanding there.”

In fact, the client has already seen both a pdf and digital proof by this stage, and with press proofing carried out on the machine that will be used to print the piece, Dennington says that by the time the job is on press, operators can be fairly sure that the colours are exactly as the client wants them. Furthermore, if a particular colour such as a Pantone is required by the brief, Colouration will run special colours rather than attempting to approximate it in a four-colour process.

As reported in The Print Business last month, Colouration recently invested in a five-colour Ryobi 750 – its first foray into the B2 format. According to Dennington, this provides the company both with a greater range of work and with more flexibility. Before the purchase, Colouration’s flagship B3 press (a six-colour Ryobi 520 installed two years ago) was running at around 90% capacity and at times, he says, “there weren’t enough hours in the day”. Now the presses typically run at 70% capacity and, with the institution of a double day shift, Dennington says that the new machine has approximately doubled the company’s capacity.

The Ryobi technology clearly has an important influence over Colouration’s business direction, and the persuasive skills of UK distributor Apex have helped Dennington to become a convert from Heidelberg. Prior to the sale, Apex carried out a site survey for Colouration and gave Dennington a tour of a similar facility that already had a Ryobi installed. In one instance where Colouration’s first Ryobi broke down as a result of an operator error, the company was also offered the use of another model housed at Apex’s demonstration facility.

Dennington has only praise for his Ryobi presses: “Their machines are so well engineered now that they’ll stand up against the Heidelberg equivalent but at a cheaper price,” he says. “I equate it to Mercedes and Lexus. German engineering can’t be faulted but the Japanese will go away, copy it and improve it where they can at a cheaper price.”

The Ryobi B2 will not be Colouration’s last investment this year. With a bullish growth target of 20-25% in 2008, Dennington also plans to add bookletmaking and direct-to-substrate technology. Those would complement an already wide array of processes housed at the company, which includes ctp, cad cam plotting and cutting, die cutting and creasing, guillotining and large format mounting. And – naturally for a printer serving high street brands – there is also wide format for point of sale applications such as posters, window banners and backlit duratrans.

Dennington believes that it is this range of skills and processes that allows Colouration to thrive, though he almost winces as he tentatively proffers the words “one-stop shop”. Elaborating, however, he explains that the real upshot of this is a competitive advantage over other printers and agencies on customer service terms: “People tend to specialise either in print or in large format and graphics, and we do both equally well, so I can only think that our main competitors would be an agency, because you would go to them and ask for the full range and they would source it all.

“If we take it on, we produce it ourselves. Our clients are mainly end users as opposed to third-party agencies or farmers and we are the production house, so it is the shortest distance from A to B.”

He is also convinced of the benefits of Colouration being a young company, which consequently has never had to shed excess baggage in the form of inefficient workflows or obsolete technology. It has grown its production capabilities in response to its expanding client base, rather than adding capacity for the sake of doing so, then going on a wild goose chase in order to fill it. Similarly, new technologies have only been added as the need has been identified, meaning that the company is not lumbered with expensive equipment that could go out of date before there is a chance to use it.

In an industry that is having to revolutionise itself through the service it offers, Colouration has survived and prospered because it has developed the new Holy Grail of print – added value – as an integral part of its business proposition, and it has done so from the very beginning through organic growth. It has developed a model where an average run is in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands, and which according to the md depends not on constantly printing higher volumes, but simply on “quality, reasonably priced”.

Not perturbed by the seemingly constant streams of bad news from printers across the country, Dennington believes that Colouration still has a long way to go and a long way to grow. “I think that from where we are now to where we are going is the biggest step,” he says. “We’re looking to a bigger, better future in print.”