The £29.3m turnover group comprises print wing Taylor Bloxham with sales of around £14m, storage and distribution business Fastant, point-of-sale design and production operation Instore, and direct mail business Mailbox.
The long-standing family business was established in 1938 and employs around 190 people.
Yesterday afternoon (6 February) employees were informed the business was going into administration, with staff sent home and hourly paid production staff left in the lurch as a result.
“Salaried staff were paid on 28th January, but the wages for hourly paid workers were due tomorrow on the 7th,” an employee said.
“The staff have been kept in the dark, strung along to be told they won’t be paid at the death. Simply disgusting. Workers were crying. Some have been there a lot of years.”
The employee said people had been “treated with no respect at all”.
Another employee commented: “We thought something wasn’t right but didn’t think it was this bad. We completed our last job at 1pm [yesterday].”
Administrators from FRP Advisory are expected to release a statement imminently.
Speculation about the situation at the business had been increasing over recent weeks. A winding-up petition was filed in December, and although this was apparently satisfied the petition had been substituted with a new petitioner.
An administration application was filed by Taylor Bloxham Group Ltd on 29 January, with a hearing set for today (7 February) at Manchester Crown Court.
The applicants are Teresa-Anne Dunleavy, Robert Lockwood, April Sharpless, Jacqueline Sharpless, Wesley Sykes and Matthew Wennington.
Last summer the firm looked outside the industry with the appointment of marcomms expert Dunleavy as its new group CEO. She was selected as Lockwood’s successor partly due to her specialism in working with companies undergoing significant structural and cultural change.
Dunleavy has been contacted by Printweek but has not commented.
Taylor Bloxham’s parent company is The Print People Group, which is controlled by April Sharpless, the daughter of long-standing chairman the late Bruce Sharpless who died in 2011.
It’s understood that attempts to find buyers for all or part of Taylor Bloxham had proved unsuccessful. Sources told Printweek that potential trade buyers had been shown around the firm’s facilities over the past month, with Paragon Group and Elanders said to have been among those who took a look at the company.
The firm’s extensive plant list includes a high-spec 18,000sph Koenig & Bauer six-colour Rapida 106, installed in 2018, and two 12-colour long perfecting Heidelberg Speedmasters: an XL105 and 102, both with CutStar.
It also has two HP Indigo digital presses and a wide array of finishing kit.
Last year the group expanded Fastant by taking on a much larger site, and also upgraded its setup at Mailbox with a new Nipson monochrome printing line.
The print wing focuses on high-quality print including specialist colour matched products for clients including paint companies. However, it stopped producing paint cards for Akzo Nobel in 2018, and it took longer than envisaged to replace that work with new business.
The Taylor Bloxham Group's most recent accounts, for the year to 30 September 2018, show an operating loss of £533k and a bottom line loss of nearly £869k. The business re-financed some of its assets for £220k, obtained an increase in funding from an existing provider of £500k and agreed a ‘time to pay’ arrangement with HMRC. Net current liabilities were £3.3m.
