After a successful tender winning process, members of our now Your Creative Sauce team began work on streamlining and making Close Brothers Group’s print ordering more efficient. They presented a print audit to their central procurement team, showcasing areas where print could be consolidated and techniques could be improved to bring costs down.

Being a single supplier to all their divisions allowed the team to take advantage of running multiple office location business stationery and operational documents on the same printing press at the same time, reducing both the unit price and delivery time for such items. They also standardised their brand’s colour swatches and paper stocks, ensuring all items matched each other every time. This was showcased when advising them to move business card printing onto digital presses rather than lithographic. They carefully guided the client through the pros and cons between the two printing techniques, eventually delivering large cost savings and a quicker service.

All of this was packaged into an online print ordering system and presented to each division. Each had a set of users that could order and set items such as business cards online. Once finished, orders would be sent to a predesignated approval manager either in marketing or procurement so that brand and cost could be signed off before production. All items created for each division where automatically added to the system daily so that the client could control and quickly reorder when needed.

Over time with the success and reliability of the teams brand control and printing services they began to work closely with each division’s marketing teams. They began to supply artwork and typesetting services which eventually grew into conceptual design services and also digital services. They became brand custodians working on everything the brand touched. From brochures and adverts, to emailers and movies, to exhibitions and 80+ highly accurate financial operational legal agreement documents to which their whole business worked from and relied upon to sell their services. One of the teams major rebrand projects was for their motor finance division, which required multiple print items to be printed at the same time using different techniques and delivered to hundreds of locations throughout the UK every month. Further efficiencies and brand consistencies were found when the team introduced a common photo library and standardised brief/quoting documents.

Members of our teams have been fortunate to be involved in many exciting projects, from Close Brothers head office, where they fabricated a whole office floor to showcase to Close Brothers staff how and when they would be moving to a new location. To the source, production, delivery, email design and digital marketing of bespoke branded yellow plant toys for a recent promotion for a division providing Plant finance. Eventually, the overall design, print and digital expertise that members of our teams showcased ensured any new items they produced were updated in the overall Close Brothers Groups brand guidelines. In conclusion, a good example of the ‘single sauce’ approach for all brand solutions that Your Creative Sauce strive to offer to all clients.