MPS invests for a sustainable future

The three new Tesla's at the firm's Bristol factory
The three new Tesla's at the firm's Bristol factory

MPS Marketing Services has rounded off a circa £650,000 spend this year on kit and infrastructure with a move to switch its company fleet to electric vehicles as it positions itself for a “sustainable future” on all fronts: financial and environmentally.

The Winford, Bristol-based business swapped three of the vehicles in its five car fleet, which is used by the sales and management teams, for Tesla full electric cars over the summer. The remaining two are set to be replaced when their leases run out in the coming months.

Rob Fagnani, who founded the business in 2008, said that he felt that going all electric was the right thing to do to support the environmental aspirations of the business, which mirror those of its clients.

“We’re do a lot of work for green companies, so it’s important we share their goals and ambitions,” he said.

The new cars followed the business, which employs 11 full time and eight part-time staff, replacing the lighting across its three adjacent factory units with 100% LED lighting and upgrading the heating with non-element heaters.

The investment in the infrastructure and fleet followed the £3.5m turnover business swapping out its Xerox print engines, which had come to the end of their lease, replacing them late year with a 100ppm Canon ImagePress C10000VP and a 182ppm Canon VarioPrint 6180 Titan mono printer.

“We went to see them in Venlo and I fell in love with the 10000 and the Titan is a dream machine,” said Fagnani.

He said that the firm had looked at both inkjet and toner, as its volumes straddle both, but opted for toner after scrutinising the total cost of ownership.

“With the Canons we have the best of both worlds, the quality of digital [toner] and a pricing model that matches inkjet.”.

The Canon production presses feed a mailroom consisting of a range of kit including two Neopost intelligent inserting lines.

The business offers a range of transactional print and mailing and hybrid mail services to clients across local authority, education, and financial services sectors amongst others.

According to Fagnani, the business has remained at near full capacity despite the pandemic and has not used the furlough scheme. He is looking at further kit investments in the coming months to support its strategy of sustainable growth.

“It’s almost embarrassing, but we’ve actually grown through the pandemic, we’re busier. We work for more than 20 local authorities, billing and electoral services, so suddenly when they closed their offices our daily [hybrid mail] increased and on top of that we had lot of coronavirus mailings, so our volumes went up.

“If this continues we will have to look at an additional machine.”