Positive Images UK marks 25th birthday

Positive Images UK has turned 25 and has attributed its success to diversifying at the right times and always striving for perfection.

The Mitcham-based family-owned company’s story began back in 1989 when managing director Danny Sullivan’s father set up Solo Print.

Sullivan joined the company four years later and the business became Positive Images UK, opening its doors for the first time in its new guise on 18 August 1993.

As the business started to grow it invested in new technology, installing a five-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 75 and an HP Indigo 5500 in 2010. It is looking to upgrade the latter in the next few months.

In 2016 the company achieved ISO 27001:2013 data security accreditation and invested in a Cygnus data cleansing and processing suite and earlier this year it launched a new multichannel service.

Now a 23-staff business, which is targeting turnover of £2.2m for the current financial year, Positive operates from a leased 2,300sqm factory in Surrey and also has a London sales office.

“I am very proud of the way the company has progressed. We’ve grown our family business from a single printing press into a multichannel marketing provider,” said Sullivan.

“We have always put the client at the centre of our journey, listening to their requirements and putting the value-added service around that.

“And we’ve always moved with the times. The biggest change we’ve seen is the automation of everything – that’s the key behind it all from web-to-print, multichannel and all of the investment that we’ve made in IT and hardware.”

To mark its anniversary, the whole Positive team went to dinner and drinks in Wimbledon on Friday (7 September).

“We know we are nothing without the right people. The team here at Positive has grown steadily and we now have a fantastic team, who continue to deliver,” said Sullivan.

The company is next looking to establish an in-house academy, for which it will be recruiting in the next few months.

“We don’t really talk to our clients about print, we talk about the pain that they’ve got,” said Sullivan.

“So we’re looking for some young blood to come in and to attract that we’ve got our first open day with a local college coming up where we’ve got 20 students coming in to do a workshop.”

Positive provides a range of print, direct mail and marketing services for clients in the retail, media, financial, charity, and health and wellbeing sectors.

Alongside its Heidelberg and HP kit, it operates four Roland DG wide-format printers and a wide array of direct mail and finishing equipment and machinery.