IT’S A MOOT POINT WHETHER Vario Press wins more business because of its highly defined service ethic, which has enable David Clarke to build a business heading to £5 million in sales from litho, digital and larger format print, backed by sophisticated web ordering and a design business, or because of Janet Clarke’s Christmas cakes.

As with so much about the company from Langley near Heathrow, all these factors are intertwined. It’s a successful recipe. Growth to a 50-strtong company has been entirely organic. Sales grew 6% last year to £4.25 million and David Clarke is confident of reaching the £5 million target in the next financial year. His confidence rests on a round of investment that in recent weeks has seen Sakurai deliver a pair of 575SD B2 presses, and HP Indigo install a 5500 digital press. On the prepress side, investment in a Kodak Prinergy front end has ensured that the flow of plates keeps up with demand.

Meanwhile, dozens of Christmas cakes are at this time of year being prepared for highly appreciative buying departments that have worked with Vario over the year. A spike in enquiries may be as much to do with the possibilities of seasonal fare as about the new printing equipment.

Both investments extend long-standing relationships. Vario has been running an Indigo 1000 since the Clarkes’ son, Guy, submitted a dissertation about how a litho printer might move into digital print, as part of his London College of Printing (LCP) degree. Guy is now a director of the business along with Mark Faraday.

Vario’s relationship with Sakurai goes back further, to the day in 1985 when a planned demonstration of a Heidelberg GTO press went wrong. David Clarke says: “We came away from Heidelberg very disappointed and decided to find out about a press we heard was called the Saku-something. We went for a demonstration and the press was installed within a week.”

That single-colour B3 machine was followed by two-colour and then larger presses, culminating in the installation of the most up-to-date five-colour presses in September this year.

The first five-colour Sakurai came when, in 2000, Clarke was looking for the “best, most automated press I could buy. I found that the Sakurai 572 had the slickest plate change and was the most affordable press.” The business has also had a Komori half-sheet press, which has been sold on as deposit for the latest investment. Vario checked out Komori and other presses before returning to Sakurai. The new machines run without IPA (Vario plans to achieve FSC and then other environmental certifications) and have closed loop control through scanning densitometers at the control desk. This will slice further into make ready times, so is ideal for a business which seeks out shorter print runs. “Make ready is where you make profit,” says Clarke.

Vario dates back to 1970 when the company was born with a Multilith 1250 in the back of an employment agency in West Drayton. At the time litho printing was unusual amid a sea of hot metal. The business grew, adding offshoots to tackle finishing, design and even picture framing. However in 2000, Clarke had the opportunity to buy out two of the original partners and at the same time reorganised the business into a single entity. The finishing business was troubled by bad debts and having separate businesses was not tax efficient.

Since then Vario has tried to offer everything from its own resources, Clarke being determined not to give away business (and profit) he doesn’t need to. In this way the company added design, photography and large format inkjet for exhibition panels as customers’ needs changed. One of the customers for the inkjet work is now a substantial customer for the litho side. “One area will often feed the other,” says Clarke.

Now Sakurai is keen to try to sell one of its screen cylinder presses to offer in-house uv varnishing and the managing director is definitely thinking about it, though not yet able to justify the £170,000 investment. Otherwise most other finishing is offered; design was added when the idea of travelling around different agencies to collect work became too expensive. There is now a nine-strong design team.

However, Clarke says the biggest change came with the decision to buy the digital press. “It was probably the best thing I ever did in terms of printing presses,” he says. “But we never sell ‘digital print’. It is all just printing.”

Equally important to the shape of the business today was the realisation six or seven years ago that the internet was going to be big. “We could see the importance of the web,” he says. “What we needed to do was get our main customers web-based, which is what we have done.”

Vario again made its own luck by taking on a fellow student of Guy’s from the LCP who has proved to be an IT genius and manages the development of that side of the business. Vario has built its own MIS as well as the web to print application, and plans next to take data direct from the presses.

Equally important to the business today was the day that PPP, one of Vario’s long-standing customers, placed all its print buying in the hands of Williams Lea. “We were offered the chance to pay for their software and continue working for our client,” David Clarke says. He declined the offer. “We knew we had to fight back against them and to stay independent.”

He’s not a fan of middlemen, preferring to work directly with customers than through agencies. Direct customers pay faster, and there’s only one customer to try to please – and no leakage of money. His understanding of agencies is summed up by an early experience. “When I was a boy I had a Saturday job with a greengrocer. One of my first tasks each week was to polish up some tomatoes, wrap them and put them at the front of the stall as ‘Best tomatoes, 1/6 a lb’. The ordinary tomatoes without the polish were just the same, stayed at the back and sold 1/- a lb. Polishing tomatoes – that’s what agencies do.”

The loss of that customer was not critical to the business: Vario had other customers of equally long standing. It had been working for National Panasonic from the 1970s when the then new Japanese business operated from an office on the same small estate; it has been working for two vehicle manufacturers for just as long. These sorts of relationship form the bedrock of the Vario business. Each of the car companies has web-based ordering for marketing materials, manuals and similar; and each has a client room which dealers can call with any problems they have regarding their printed materials, or to order different printed materials outside the online system.

Vario’s web to print system allows clients both to call off stock and to create different leaflets and catalogues. For the car dealer networks there is a timeline of the different campaigns they are contracted to run during the year, with all the artwork associated with the campaign. For example, a campaign on servicing an air conditioning unit will include flyers, letterheads, pull-up banner displays and so on. The print is attractively priced, thanks both to Vario’s competitive pricing and to support from car parts manufacturers. “If it isn’t cheap, the dealers would be put off,” Clarke explains. Vario will also up-sell materials to increase the effectiveness of a campaign, while all the time being able to track orders and report to its customer on what materials have been ordered.

A customer can buy 50,000 manuals for the year, for example, at an agreed rate. Vario will print 20,000 and watch over stock levels, which it can top up using slack time for its presses, and can offer the customer the chance to amend the content. Everybody is happy.

For its car dealers there is the opportunity to build catalogues of different spare parts that each dealer is expected to promote and sell. The trade in manufacturer spare parts to independent garages and traders is big business with benefits around warranty issues, fitting and so on.

The dealer logs in to the system and is guided through a choice of covers, promotion items, prices and so on; either using suggested text or entering his own. The images of the different parts are taken from the database and automatically added to the pages by Quark Dynamic Publishing System, which handles the cut-outs and the creation of the PDF both for the client to proof from and for Vario to image and print. The catalogues that are produced go well beyond the business cards, manuals and simple marketing fare that is the staple diet of web to print applications.

It has generated a business model that Vario has extended to other clients, and which it continues to grow step by step. “We want to keep growth under control,” Clarke says.

When one of the directors of its car customer moved to Holland, Vario was asked to extend its business to Europe because the director could find no printer able to offer the same services he had been used to. Vario declined, finding the language too great a barrier. However, it is starting to work for dealers in Ireland and Clarke is working on the logistics of minimising transportation costs. Typically he has struck a good deal for the UK: “On any one night we can have 1,000 parcels of work going out of here, with different combinations of leaflets, posters and so on. These days the majority of our business is done in this way and it is a type of business that is more secure than it would otherwise be,” he says.

The next year is going to bring further opportunities. The twin Sakurais will boost capacity, as will the new HP. Clarke has also calculated that running black-only for variable data on the reverse of a litho-printed sheet is less expensive on the 5500 than running print through a copier. “We know too that printers are going to have to be a certain size in order to survive,” he adds.