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Adam Soble

When faced with the prospect of steering our business through a pandemic my first thoughts were how we could pull every- one together to support each other. Ini- tially we sent everyone home to stay safe
with their families. I’m not sure if they appreciated the online training courses on Microsoft Excel, but after years of excuses I wasn’t going to pass up on this opportunity! But our focus was soon drawn to the imminent PPE crisis, and we started prototyping visors and sourcing clear plastic films suitable for making face shields for key workers.
In July 2019, we’d invested in a new Arizona 1360XT printer and Zund G3 cutting table, both of which became invaluable to o ur pandemic response efforts. After sourcing sufficient material to manufacture 45,000 visors and volunteering our capabilities to our two local NHS Trusts, we soon became their main supplier of face shields.
One of our core strengths is our agility and once the urgent demand for visors had been met, our focus moved to the products others businesses would need to allow them to safely reopen as lockdown measures eased. We developed a range
of screening products using flexible and rigid plastics. With supply of raw materials initially under pressure we sized the screening to ensure optimal yields, limiting wastage, to deliver a high quality cost effective solution.
As a business that typically orders materials on a short lead time to meet an immediate demand, we have revised our ordering and stock control processes to forecast demand and commit to advance order of materials in volume - which has at times been daunting when the external environment remains so uncertain.
We have strong partnerships with our suppliers and we received incredible support from each of them - they assisted us with securing clear plastic films, clear acrylic sheets, floor graphic films and the portable display frameworks we needed. My personal thanks go to all of our suppliers, including Perspex Distribution, Canon, Spandex, Antalis, Papergraphics and Magnetic Solutions - they all went above and beyond to support us.
As with many businesses Covid-19 has caused significant disruption to our usual business, moving us from a print focussed business to predominantly the design, manufacture and distribution of screen systems, along with floor graphics and signage. Fortunately we have been able to not just keep our team productive but have been able to create new roles to help us shape our business as we move forward.
The pandemic has opened our eyes to the wider potential
of Cotswold Printing Company, allowing us to simulate and prove new routes to market. We’ve grown from three or four parcels a day with TNT to over 100 every day. We’ve refined our processes to shorten our lead times on manufactured prod- ucts, dispatching the next working day. We’ve developed our own eco-packaging system to reliably deliver huge sheets of
We have been able to create new roles to help us shape our business as we move forward
Perspex the length and breadth of the country with a damage rate of less than 0.5%.
Looking to the coming months and years, our immediate focus remains on developing and supplying screening products to meet our customers’ evolving needs. Beyond that we’re working on projects that will will allow us to grow our core print capability, but with a new product design and supply focus - creating a new version of our business by leveraging the skills, experience and confidence we have gained during the Covid-19 period.
Our industry is one of the lucky ones - many of us have been able to repurpose our operations to manufacture products top meet pandemic requirements. Whilst we will hopefully not
see another pandemic in our lifetime, there are some impor- tant lessons to be drawn. Being able to use our capabilities to help the community in a time of adversity demonstrates our commitment to the social responsibility we have as part of the Gloucestershire business community. I will always be incred- ibly proud of my team and the wider volunteer network that ensured we could directly help our frontline health workers.
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