The Essex-based, family-owned business designs and manufactures a range of cutters for customers in the sign and display, graphics, marine and composites industries.  

Its products include the Orion, Genesis and Mastercut portfolios as well as the Versa-Tech and Versa-Tech2 flatbed cutters. The latter, which was developed in partnership with US-based MCT Digital, recently scooped the Product of the Year award for finishing routers/cutters at this year’s SGIA in the US. 

The Amazon Growing Business Awards were launched in 1999 and winners have included successful brands such as Innocent Drinks, Fever Tree and Lovefilm.

Blackman & White are among nine other UK businesses to make the Export Champions shortlist, inlcuding Thermoseal, Crawford Healthcare and Momondo Group.

B&W managing director Alex White, whose father Les co-founded the business in 1964, said it was very exciting to have made it this far. 

"Our export numbers have averaged around 50% of our orders in the last three years but this year that has gone up to 66% and this has really been impacted by the sale of our VersaTech," he explained.

"We are really proud of our extensive experience of designing and manufacturing our products and we really believe we have a differentiator in that our machines provide greater versatility at high speed."

The 30-staff business carries out most software development, design and manufacturing for its products at B&W's site in Maldon with some design and development work also carried out by its US-based partner MCT.

White said: "We aren't a company that relies on exernally produced software, everything is designed in-house by us. We are very fortunate that the government offers financial incentives for research and development programmes so we have been able to employ really top calibre people to help us with software, design and real innovative ideas for our range of machines." 

B&W has boosted turnover from £2m to £3.2m in the last three years and White said that despite current economic uncertainty there had been no downturn in business. 

"In fact we have recently picked up one of our largest orders had to date," he said. "We have seen a positive impact from overseas because our machines have become 10%-15% cheaper overnight."

"We do worry that Brexit might cause a downturn here and of course that could affect our UK business but I think our export figures will more than compensate for that," he added.

The winners of the Amazon Growing Business Awards 2016 will be announced on 30 November.