Forty-eight years on the same estate

Donald Reeve started Meridian in 1978 with a single letterpress in a unit off Bayton Road, printing price tickets for shops in Coventry and Nuneaton. His daughter Alison ran it from 1996, and it is now run by Priya Chandra, who joined as a print estimator in 2007.

We have deliberately never opened a second site. Everything — estimating, artwork, plates, print, finishing, despatch — happens in one building, which means a query about a job is answered by walking twenty metres rather than by an email to another division.

We have been approached to sell three times. The most recent, in 2023, would have moved finishing to Leicester and it is the reason we said no.

Twenty-six in production, eight in artwork and estimating, seven in sales and despatch. Average service is eleven years and four months; our longest-serving press minder, Gary Whitehouse, joined in 1991.

Print apprenticeships have almost disappeared in this region, so we run our own: two at a time, three years, through the British Printing Industries training scheme. Nine of our current production team came through it.

The awkward waste stream in label printing is not the paper, it is the silicone release liner your labels arrive on, which does not go through normal recycling and which the industry has historically sent to landfill in very large quantities.

Ours goes to a specialist reprocessor in Cheshire: 41 tonnes last year, of which 38 were recovered. Matrix waste goes to energy recovery. We hold FSC Chain of Custody, ISO 14001, and we will send you the actual figures rather than a page about our commitment.

The honest position is that nesting artwork better at the design stage saves more waste than any downstream process, and we will suggest it when your layout allows.