Lockerley, Hampshire-based Nelson Press was founded by the Knight family in 1946 as a letterpress printer in Southampton and has thrived ever since printing raffle, draw, event, lottery, admission and race night and voucher tickets as well as gift vouchers and ballot papers.

In 2006 owner Roger Knight sold the business to the Whitehill Print Group, then a general trade printer with several companies in different sectors. The parent company has gradually sold off its other concerns to concentrate on the ticket trade.

Now the company has decided to celebrate seven successful decades by running a free draw open to all print professionals. It is offering a £70 cash prize for the winner and a £70 credit note for the runner up.

Nelson Press managing director Chris Richards estimated Nelson Press had printed more than a billion tickets during its history.

“We print all sorts of tickets for the trade; probably 80% are raffle and draw tickets for around 2,000 other printers. We didn’t suffer too much during the recession because when times are hard people need to fundraise and raffle tickets are a big way of fundraising, we’ve been lucky,” he said.

“There’s such a tradition of physically selling a piece of paper for a draw, we’ve experienced 15% growth since we took over 10 years ago.”

Nelson Press runs two Heidelberg GTO presses, two Heidelberg Platens, one with inline hot foiling, a Heidelberg Cylinder and a Kora as well as a Polydiam A5 Foil Bloker, a Ryobi 500N-NP with inline raffle/draw ticket assembly and a 2400x2400dpi Xerox 700. A custom-built inline numbering, perforating and gluing system supplied by Auto Feeders and a raft of finishing kit completes the lineup. 

It offers letterpress, litho, hot foil and digital printing, taking orders which range from 1,000 to a million tickets at its 10-staff 465sqm site.

Tickets for the 70th anniversary raffle are available through the company’s website www.nelsonpress.co.uk and IPIA chair Marian Stefani will make the draw on 29 April.