The Leicester-based company’s co-founder Alvin Brown started the business with a small loan and a secondhand folding machine after being made redundant in 1975. As Senator Print Finishers the business became one of the largest trade print finishers in the UK.
Senator saw a gap in the market for small format/pharmaceutical folding and gradually increased investment in miniature folding machines in the 1980s.
It then incorporated Clinical Print Finishers (UK) Ltd as a separate trading division in the 1990s to service pharmaceutical packaging companies.
Alan Pickles, operations director at Clinical Print Finishers, told Printweek: “We’ve invested and taken risks, over decades, in buying kit that wasn’t available in the UK. At the time we took some pretty big gambles and bought kit and then tried to create the market for it.
“Our co-founder, Alvin Brown, was always keen to get to America, Switzerland, Germany, and Japan to just see what was going on and what wasn’t available in the UK that we could do something with here. And he instilled that in managing director Jamie [Court] and myself to continue that.
“We’re not changing the world as print finishers, but we’ve innovated quite a bit in our kit just to try and stay ahead of the game.”
Pickles said the company folded the first ever Z-card for George McDonald, inventor of the Z-card. The business now has three dedicated Z-fold card gluing lines.
“Back in the 1980s there was a gap in the market for small format folding and that tied in nicely with us producing the first ever Z-card, which is still a core part of our business,” said Pickles.
Over the last 20 years Clinical has invested over £5m in new equipment, sourced from Europe, Japan, and the US. As well as taking on many UK-first installs, it has invested in a raft of bespoke machines that have been built within its in-house engineering facility.
Pickles said some of the company’s UK-first installs over the years had included 12 plate, 14 plate and 16 plate folding machines, a pharmaceutical folded ‘outsert’ line, a reel-fed Ochsner folding line, a pharmaceutical leaflet ‘piggybacking’ line, a Bograma inline folder/stitcher/die-cutter, a Tisora trimmer, and an EMC trimmer.
Its most recent investment was in camera systems installed on two of its pharmaceutical lines last summer.
Also serving commercial print customers, Clinical employs 30 staff and turns over around £1.5m annually from its circa-2,300sqm site.
