Mainstream Direct adds paper-enclosing facility in 200,000 spend

Trade mailing house Mainstream Direct has increased its paper-enclosing capacity as part of a 200,000 spend.

The 60-staff, Northampton-based company installed a £100,000, six-station CMC 150 paper-enclosing system earlier this month, following the purchase of a six-station Aims STS line last September.

Managing director Richard Haines said he now wants to increase paper-enclosing capacity even further, with plans for a second CMC machine already in discussion.

"We installed the high-speed line on the strength of a couple of jobs we had won and have already won additional orders on top of that," he said.

"We have specialised in a number of areas, such as data and lasering, and we were best known for our hand fulfilment and polywrapping. We handled short-run and overflow paper-enclosing work and now we will be picking up longer-run work, such as door drops."

Haines added that, although paper enclosing still only made up 15% of the company's work, the business had doubled its capacity with the investment.

According to Haines the £3m-turnover company has come out of a "pretty rough 2009", but he claimed that the "signs are good" for the rest of 2010.

"We are in a good position – we own our own equipment outright and we aren't overloaded by debt. We run a pretty tight ship and we managed to go through the trouble of last year without having to make redundancies."