Images_Digital_Edition_September_2019

IS DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 48 images SEPTEMBER 2019 Images talks to Ed Snelson and Hannah Benson of Signature Printing about the company’s rapid expansion from a back-bedroom business to one that’s well on its way to achieving multi-million pound sales S ix years ago, Ed Snelson was selling designer T-shirts in his spare time as a side project from a bedroom in his house in Chester. Now, with business partner Hannah Benson, he heads rapidly expanding company Signature Printing, operating from 8,000 square feet of warehouse space and thriving on demand for personalised gifts and garments through websites such as Ebay and Amazon. With plans for even more growth, he is well on his way to achieving his dream of being at the helm of a business with multimillion- pound sales: Ebay recently highlighted more than a thousand sellers that have achieved sales of more than £1m on the platform in the past year, and Ed was one of them. “I have always been driven by a desire to grow a business and be self-employed and not necessarily be in the nine-to-five rut,” he says. Ed first got a taste for the garment industry while at school at the age of 16, when he was involved in setting up a company as part of the Young Enterprise scheme, with its own line of clothing. He later embarked on a four-year apprenticeship in logistics and Signature style I have always been driven by a desire to grow a business supply chain management with aeronautics and space group Airbus but, as time went by, he continued to dream of being his own boss. From a spare bedroom, he started small, working evenings and weekends on top of his full-time job, selling pre- decorated T-shirts, drawing on the experience and supplier contacts he had developed through the Young Enterprise venture. With Hannah, who was working for an estate agent, he identified an opportunity to take it to the next level. “We looked at the customisation market which was massive,” Ed recalls, “and we wondered how could we enter this space, but without incurring enormous amounts of overheads.” With just a heat press and a vinyl cutter, the pair moved into personalisation, sourcing garments from wholesaler Ralawise, based only a few miles north-west of Chester – a relationship that continues today. “We found that personalisation was getting the majority of the sales which was a key indicator of how we could try to grow the business,” Ed says. “It was from there that we started to slowly expand the range.” Both he and Hannah decided it was “time to take a risk” and gave up their day jobs. “The day I left my job, I was still working from a bedroom but, within one month, it had already grown a fair bit.” After pitching to the University of Chester, they were given free space in its innovation centre for incubating start-ups, but within three months, their new business, Signature Printing, had outgrown the space. They relocated to slightly bigger premises up the road but, despite taking over a second unit next door, it was soon time to move again, not least because they now had five staff, which brought them to their current home at Evans Business Park in Chester. The Signature team: recruiting the company’s first member of staff was the “best investment we ever made”