BAPC awards celebrate print excellence

The British Association for Print and Communications (BAPC) hosted its annual awards at a lunch held on Wednesday (11 February).

Representatives of three winning companies were presented with their accolades at the event, which was sponsored by EFI.

Brilliant Media managing director Simon Tabelin, Duplo International UK managing director Peter Jolly and Formara owner Phil Wilce picked up awards for Business of the Year, Supplier of the Year and Environmental Printer of the Year respectively.

The other shortlisted companies in the Business of the Year category were Clarkeprint, Copy Color, Fineline Printing, Formara, Print 4 UK, Pureprint and Screaming Colour.

“We’ve always been proud to support the BAPC and are honoured to have won this prestigious award for the second time,” said Brilliant Media’s Tabelin.

The Supplier of the Year shortlist also included Allprint, Bishops, Canon UK, IFS, Konica Minolta, Morgana Systems, Ricoh UK, Renz UK and Vivid Laminating Technologies.

Duplo International’s Jolly said: “We are really proud of this award. We are working hard as a business to continuously evolve.

“We invest many hours in our customer forums asking what makes a great supplier now and what will be required in the future. We never stand still. We hope this award reflects the success of our ability to listen, adapt and deliver on what we promise.”

DST Output and Pepper Communications were the other companies shortlisted in the Environmental Printer of the Year category.

Formara’s Wilce said: “Formara is a cutting-edge business, which has a loyal customer base. We have always put considerable emphasis on our environmental credentials that are second to none. Receiving the BAPC Environmental Printer of the Year award makes us very proud. It’s all about service.”

BAPC chairman Sidney Bobb said: “We had a terrific response to the awards this year, which is always closely fought.

“We kept it low key and decided to do a lunch instead of a conference this year because we don’t run conferences for profit, but we can run them for too much of a loss, and sponsorship is very difficult to attract. But we had to give awards out and this seemed to be the most effective way of doing it.”

He added: “We don’t look for the quality of the print as such but businesses that focus on service, expertise, diversification and added value.

“Brilliant Media have expanded very rapidly without debt and they’ve diversified and have customers all over Europe, despite being fairly small.

“They’re a very interesting company and if they can keep the momentum going I think they’ll expand even further. There are too many companies that do the same as everybody else, but Brilliant are out of the ordinary and think about what they’re doing.”

Nominations for the awards came from BAPC members, suppliers and print industry contacts and the BAPC then whittles down the nominations into shortlists for each category before independent adjudicators chose the winners.