Adare secures multimillion-pound N Brown contract

Adare Secure Essential Communications (SEC) has won a contract to provide mail services for retailer N Brown Group, in what its sales director described as a “multi-year, multimillion-pound win”.

The contract, which was secured in July but has only just been made public, will involve the printing of documents to be sent out in around 20 million envelopes per year. It will begin in early 2017 and will be serving JD Williams, one of the largest brands in the N Brown Group.

Adare sales director Martyn Viquerat said: “We’re delighted to be working with the team at JD Williams. It is such an innovative and successful business and we are delighted to support its digital transformation."

“We will be producing all their statements, finance letters and customer letters and converting them from pre-print to personalised digital printed documents. Within that, we will be using our Smart Edit letter management technology, which allows customers to amend the content of letters and statements themselves.”

The job went to tender at the end of 2015 and is the first Adare has won for N Brown.

All work will be printed at Adare’s Huddersfield site on its two Ricoh VC6000 colour inkjet web presses, both purchased at Drupa for £3.3m. Installation of the two printers has now been completed.

Viquerat said the contract easily ranks in Adare’s top 10 current contracts in terms of volume and how much it is worth. 

Last month, it won another multimillion-pound contract to support the delivery of multi-channel essential communications for Domestic & General. This contract is for up to 30 million paper documents per year and printing is also being carried out on the new Ricohs.

Viquerat said this has so far been “successful” and that Adare hopes “to continue to be successful in this space”.

Adare managing director Barry Crich said: “Like Adare SEC, N Brown Group is a forward-thinking company, which is dedicated to delivering the best possible experience and service for its customers, and we look forward to working together.” 

In August, Adare installed a bookletmaker from UK manufacturer Wilstead, along with a Dimuken foiling and numbering machine and a bespoke plastic card personalisation machine. 

It has also had a busy few months in terms of acquisitions. In July, it acquired Polestar Applied Solutions (PAS), which was one of the Polestar businesses that did not go into administration in April. 10 weeks earlier it acquired Banner Managed Communication (BMC) for an undisclosed sum.

It now employs around 1,100 staff across all of its operations and has a turnover of around £240m. Adare SEC, which has 540 staff, accounts for around £90m of the group’s turnover.