Hi All,

It’s been a slow week this week, I guess the bank holidays don’t help as a lot of people take holidays around this time of the year.

It was quite upsetting today that we lost a plastic card order to one of our competitors. We had various communications with this customer and we were really quite upset to loose the order. We lost the order on price and unfortunately the customer did not come back to us to see if we could price match. Looking at the costing for this order unfortunately we would not have been able to match the price of this other company who outsources production to China and hence has very low labour rates.

We have considered in the past outsourcing to countries with low labour rates but for a couple of reasons decided not to. Namely, out of loyalty to the UK and lack of control over quality. If all companies had the same loyalty perhaps the economy would be in a slightly better state today. I plead with you all, find out where the products you purchase are produced, lets support this country and hopefully less people will lose there homes and jobs.

We did warn this particular customer to be careful in relation to any optional extras they require. This other company does not offer postal proofs which means any optional extras such as barcodes or magnetic strips can not be tested with scanning machinery before the order is printed. You would be surprised how many customers come back to us after receiving there postal proof needing to make an amendment (for example they realise a HICO magnetic strip is needed instead of a LOCO magnetic strip or the barcode needs a prefix to be recognized by the scanner).

Bye for now & remember if you support UK businesses it also supports you by ensuing the money you spend stays in the UK