HISTORY

Alan Duffy trained and comes from a well established printing background, going back to the 1900’s in Manchester. Extensive knowledge of print has been gained from an early age whilst working at weekends in a printing factory and then achieving a degree in printing and packaging technology as best graduate of the year. He has extensive print management experience working in numerous blue chip, corporate businesses including Boots, Royal and Sun Alliance amongst others. Alan Duffy has been a Consultant, Factory Manager and Purchasing Manager within the industry and has set up printing factories, design rooms and purchasing units. Throughout his career, his main role however in these businesses was the managing of large extensive print runs and the continual monitoring of quality control / assurance to ensure the right literature was produced effectively and delivered to a given timescale.

With this wide and varied range of skills and knowledge as a basis, he started his own business in Design & Print and hence Masterprint came into being and is based in an up and coming area of St Helens.

DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Over the last 10 years, the print market has altered somewhat with smaller print run quantities and a new area has been born – digital print. There is still the traditional lithographic printing for longer print quantities but now the designer can now work digitally and ultimately this has opened up ‘The Digital Age’, allowing smaller more directed marketing at an economic price. Dependant upon the desired market and required objective – each has its own merit. We have a wide variety of softwares, and PC and mac computers, print machines and extensive finishing equipment.

During this time with the acceptance of digital, the competition has become fiercer due to globalisation and cost cutting. This has lead to a number of our competitors closing down. This has meant the streamlining of the business and adapting to the ebbs and flows of the market. So over a period of years we have sourced certain works and now find that we are in the position to offer a wide range of skills under the one roof.

MARKETING, COPYWRITING, CREATIVE THINKING, ILLUSTRATION, BRANDING, PHOTOGRAPHY, DESIGN & ARTWORK, DIGITAL & TRADITIONAL PRINT AND PROMOTIONAL MERCHADISING.

ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS

Another area that has become a prime importance to our industry is the Environmental Issue. A few years back we got involved with the Bellamy Initiative that promotes the planting of trees.
That’s not all. We want to encourage local schools to make the most of their grounds by planting trees. This helps create woodland habitat, increases bio-diversity and, most importantly, provides an excellent learning resource — planting the trees, watching them grow, seeing how wildlife is encouraged and charting the changing seasons and weather.
We need your help… Our partners tree appeal will plant a tree for every 20 orders we receive. You can make a difference by choosing us for your leaflets, stationery, posters and other printing and telling your friends about our Trees for Schools campaign. Help us reach our target ofplaning 100,000 trees.(we’ve already passed the 50,000 tree mark).
We are very conscious of the environment and the impact industry has on it, we are happy to support favourably other like minded companies, and that we have a green policy throughout our services. For instance, we use vegetable based inks rather than oil based, we recycle our waste paper and card, we do not use aggressive solvents, We recycle our toner cartridges, we source our paper from sustainable forests (planted by the paper industry), we try to always use more local suppliers throughout the supply of our manufacturing process. We encourage our suppliers and customers to think likewise because it benefits us

SO FINALLY...

So finally we are a DESIGN & PRINT company that offers you our services. Our doors are open to local businesses, for those of you further afield, we also have a network to offer our services nationwide. We have a very good delivery service that can get deliveries done, nationwide in a very short space of time. We use our own transport for regional deliveries and Fastway or DHL for those wider afield.  We charge only the cost of the delivery, our customers find that this delivery cost does not hinder their placing an order with us in confidence.

AND...

When you have an idea in mind, whether you are a large concern or a small business starting up or needing a change of approach, please don’t hesitate, give us a ring, we will only be too happy to discuss with you on any issue that we can help resolve, and if we can be of help then we would be happy to do business with you.

If you are a new business or a business looking or needing to expand, we can offer you our free consultation to help define your business in a creative way to appeal to your customer.