A number of clients of UK Print have contacted PrintWeek reporting delivery problems with orders placed with the print farmer. Several also highlighted that the firm's director appears to have registered a new company.
According to Companies House, Ink Paper Ltd was incorporated on 30 November 2016 at the correspondence address 71-75 Shelton Street, London, United Kingdom, WC2H 9JQ, listing Clair Rosina Hunnisett as its sole director.
Hunnisett is also listed as director of UK Print and was previously director of Houseprint t/a The Printing House, along with Neill Malcolm Stuart John, the man identified as the print farmer that takes deposits for jobs and then, often quoting alleged production problems, fails to deliver full orders.
John’s previous directorships include Britannia Press, Swane, Ambeck Corporation, Masterclass Associates, and Dragon Press. Hunnisett was also a director of Ambeck Corporation. All five companies are either dissolved or in liquidation.
Incorporated in November 2014, it appears UK Print only started taking orders in the months preceding Houseprint’s compulsory liquidation, at which point it was revealed that Houseprint had racked up losses of more than £375,000 from 1 June 2015 to cessation of activities.
UK Print's registered office address is in London, as is Ink Paper's, however PrintWeek understands from a number of former UK Print clients that John and Hunnisett are actually operating from a base in Barry, Vale of Glamorgan. UK Print formally changed its registered address from an address in Barry to an address in London in January 2015.
PrintWeek tried to contact John and Hunnisett but neither was available for comment.
The phoenix came to light when Chris Hastings, author of George the (Almost) Fearless Mouse, a crowdfunded book looking to raise awareness of the issue of high sensitivity in children, contacted PrintWeek and said he had fallen victim to UK Print.
Hasting's campaign to publish the book received more than £3,000 from around 130 backers on crowdfunder.co.uk, exceeding its £2,500 aim.
“When we placed our order with UK Print we were under the impression that UK Print was actually a printing plant. We were certainly given that impression. We only subsequently found out that it was in fact a print management company, or print farmer, sub-contracting out to actual print works,” said Hastings.
Hastings paid UK Print £2,000 upfront for 750 hardback and 2,500 paperback copies of the book but the initial delivery date in mid-December was missed and it was only at this point that John informed Hastings the books were being printed by a supplier abroad.
The campaign was geared specifically towards a pre-Christmas release and those who didn’t receive their books that had backed the campaign were said by Hastings to have felt let down.
A second delivery date of 13 January was given, but the books again failed to arrive.
At this point, Hastings asked for a full refund of the £2,000, but was told by John that he could only be returned the money in £100 increments over the following 20 weeks as it had already been given to the supplier in full. Hastings reported that when pressed on who the supplier was, John said it was based in Belgium but refused to reveal the name “for security reasons”.
Hastings said: “UK Print still could not give us any adequate answers. So we advised that unless we received immediate full refund of our money we would issue a statement to our backers and the media telling them what UK Print was telling us, as this was the only explanation we had for the situation.”
Hastings and his production team received 100% of the refund within a day of issuing this ultimatum and have now contracted the work to Norfolk-based book printing management service Biddles.
In a blog post, another author, Trevor Montague, spoke of how he contracted UK Print to print the sixth edition of his A to Z of Almost Everything series, commissioning it for a 1 October 2016 deadline with "a substantial sum" paid upfront.
UK Print missed the deadline and a second deadline of 24 October was set and missed again, with John stating at that point that there had been a binding issue. By 17 November, John offered Montague a discount on a second print run, having still not delivered the first, and Montague broke ties with him.
Another former customer said her information was being shared with customers that UK Print was in dispute with as evidence that her full order delivery had arrived, even though it came two months late, resulting in lost sales.
"We were contacted by two separate people at the end of last week asking about our experience with them. They have been given my number as people who have had books delivered and were under the impression we were happy with the service," she said.
Others have contacted PrintWeek with similar stories relating to UK Print.
