A 31-year-old Stockport printer with a £3.5 million turnover and 20 staff has been bought by a 30-person Edinburgh-rooted brand activation agency. The deal looks small on paper. Look closer and it is the cleanest case study yet of how mid-sized UK print firms are surviving a market that IBISWorld measures at £8.6 billion in 2026, down at a 2 percent compound annual rate since 2021.
Print On, founded in 1994 by the Oldfield family, is now a subsidiary of The Evolve Group. The transaction closed in January 2026 for an undisclosed sum, Printweek first reported. Long-time managing director Alex Oldfield has moved across as head of commercial at Evolve. Jason Richardson, until recently sales director at Stockport rival Galloways Printers, joins as Print On’s general manager in March.
The Deal in Plain Numbers
The headline facts are tight. Print On stays branded as Print On. All 20 staff stay in their jobs. No price was disclosed. Oldfield retains an operational link to the printer he ran for three decades while taking the commercial seat at the parent agency.
The combined entity now has roughly 50 people across two complementary disciplines: production print on the Stockport side, brand strategy and experiential builds on the Evolve side. Natalie Magee, who runs Evolve as managing director, picks up a production capability she previously had to subcontract.
- £3.5 million annual turnover at Print On going into the deal
- 20 staff retained, with no redundancies announced
- 30 employees at Evolve before the acquisition, around 33 according to The Evolve Group’s LinkedIn page
- 31 years Oldfield ran Print On as managing director
- January 2026 close, with the management transition phased over the following two months
The deal originated from a mutual contact who introduced Oldfield to Evolve’s owner. That informal route matters. It tells you this was not a banker-led process with a competitive auction. It was a direct conversation between two operators who already knew each other’s worlds.
Why a Brand Activation Agency Wanted a Printer
Brand activation is the corner of marketing that lives in the physical world. Pop-ups, in-store displays, sampling trucks, branded bar builds, festival installations. Evolve’s recent work includes a tequila truck for el Jimador at the Northern Restaurant and Bar Show 2026 and an Absolut activation at Chester Racecourse for Pernod Ricard, both featured on The Evolve Group’s services page.
Every one of those projects needs print. Lots of it. Wraparound vinyls, oil-drum graphics, neon signage substrates, branded backdrops, pavement decals, wayfinding boards, menu collateral, takeaway swag. Agencies typically buy that print from outside vendors at margin. Owning the printer captures that margin and shortens the production loop from days to hours.
“The brand activation world is significant and it’s an area I’m focusing on now primarily,” Oldfield said in his Printweek interview. “It dovetails well with the POS requirements of retailers which is really Print On’s bread and butter.”
That dovetail is the strategic thesis. Point-of-sale work for grocery and high-street chains uses the same large-format and finishing kit as agency activations. The same press that runs a Tesco shelf-edge campaign on Monday can run a brand pop-up’s vinyl wrap on Tuesday. Capacity utilisation goes up. Per-job overhead goes down.
The macro tailwind is real. The global point-of-sale display market is sized at roughly $14.7 billion in 2024 in Zion Market Research’s industry tracking, growing at a 6.8 percent compound annual rate. Europe accounts for about 28 percent of that, with the UK among the lead concentrations. The substrate is shifting toward sustainable corrugated and modular fixtures, both areas where smaller specialist printers can hold their own against the Cimpress and RR Donnelley scale players.
Oldfield’s Pivot After 31 Years
Oldfield is candid about the human side of selling the family business. He told Printweek the change was personal, not financial distress, and that he had hit a milestone birthday and wanted a different shape of working day. The new role keeps him in retail-adjacent commercial conversations without the daily weight of running production.
I turned 50 last year and I wanted something different, I was just ready for the next stage in life. The guys are doing great, so the operation with Jason now on board, it’s very stable and has opportunity to grow.
The Stockport-to-Stockport Recruit
The most overlooked detail in this story is who fills Oldfield’s seat. Jason Richardson spent 13 years as sales director at Galloways Printers, a Stockport firm with more than 150 years of history. He joined Galloways in January 2007 and led its sales team through more than a decade of structural decline in the broader UK print sector.
Richardson is not stepping into Print On from outside the Stockport printing scene. He is moving across the same Greater Manchester town to a competitor that has just been bought by an agency. That is unusual. Sales directors at heritage commercial printers tend to stay until retirement or move into broker roles. A lateral jump into a general manager seat at a freshly acquired peer signals he sees the agency-owned model as the better growth bet.
The fit is operational. Richardson knows Stockport’s client base, the regional account managers at the major retailers, and the print-buying habits of the area’s brand and marketing managers. He inherits a stable production team and a managing director, now head of commercial above him, who has been the face of the business since before he started at Galloways.
For Galloways, the loss of a 13-year sales director without a public successor announcement is not a small event. It hands a competitor across town an immediate relationship advantage in the same retail accounts.
The Industry Backdrop That Made This Deal Inevitable
UK print is a textbook fragmented declining market. Around 7,800 active businesses share that £8.6 billion of revenue, with average profit margins inching up to 5.6 percent only because weaker operators are exiting. Newspaper circulation, the single largest legacy revenue pool, is in freefall. The Audit Bureau of Circulations shows weekly Sunday print runs falling by more than 20 percent year on year across multiple national titles in late 2025.
Capability acquisitions are the obvious response. Buying a printer to plug a gap in an agency’s stack costs less than building a production floor from zero, and it brings a team with retail-print muscle memory. Buying an agency to plug a gap in a printer’s stack does the inverse. Either side of the deal works because the two skill sets do not overlap.
This is what the Evolve-Print On deal looks like in context.
| Attribute | Print On | The Evolve Group |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 1994 | Brand activation focus |
| Headcount | 20 | 30 to 33 |
| Revenue | £3.5 million | Undisclosed |
| Core service | Commercial print, retail POS | Strategy, experiential builds, brand activation |
| Headquarters | Stockport | UK with Edinburgh leadership |
| Top client type | Multi-site retailers, franchise networks | Drinks, hospitality, retail brands |
The complementarity is precise. Print On sells procurement, quality control, fulfilment and stored-and-shipped repeat work to chain retailers. Evolve sells one-off creative spectacle to brand marketing teams. The two share the buyer in roughly half of UK retail head offices, where the same marketing director signs off both the shelf-edge tickets and the summer campaign launch event.
Private equity is circling the same playbook at scale. PwC’s 2026 industrials and services M&A outlook flags professional services consolidation, technology-enabled outsourcing, and fragmented service markets as the most active themes for the year. Print firms attached to growing brand-services platforms tick all three boxes.
Regulatory pressure adds a second push. The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation went into force in February 2025 and reaches full effect in 2026. UK printers serving European-export brand owners need recyclable substrates, design-for-recycling workflows, and certified material chains. That investment is hard to fund on a £3.5 million revenue base. Easier under a parent that can amortise it across activation, packaging and POS work.
Evolve has also flagged plans to acquire bigger premises in south Manchester for storage and to invest further in production. That is the platform play in motion.
What Changes for Print On Clients
The short answer is very little, on day one. Branding stays. Staff stay. The Stockport site stays. Account managers, production schedules and existing online ordering systems are unchanged. Multi-site retail clients who use Print On’s tailored ordering portals continue to log in to the same environment.
What changes over the next 12 to 24 months is the upsell motion. Clients buying shelf-edge tickets and POS will be introduced to Evolve’s activation team for events, sampling tours and pop-up builds. Conversely, Evolve’s drinks and hospitality clients will be steered toward Print On for repeatable production work they currently buy elsewhere.
- 1994: Print On established by the Oldfield family in Stockport
- January 2007: Jason Richardson joins Galloways Printers as sales director
- January 2026: The Evolve Group completes acquisition of Print On for an undisclosed sum
- March 2026: Richardson starts as Print On general manager; Oldfield moves to head of commercial at Evolve
- 2026 onward: Plans to acquire bigger south Manchester premises for storage and production investment
Frequently Asked Questions
Will Print On’s existing clients see any service changes?
No, not in the short term. All 20 staff are staying, the Stockport site is unchanged, and the Print On brand is being retained. Tailored online ordering portals built for multi-site and franchise clients continue to operate as before. Account contacts remain the same. Over the next year, clients should expect introductions to Evolve’s brand activation team for projects beyond standard print, but nothing in the existing print contract changes.
Who is the new general manager and when does he start?
Jason Richardson, formerly sales director at Stockport’s Galloways Printers, starts as Print On’s general manager in March 2026. He spent 13 years at Galloways from January 2007, leading the sales team. Day-to-day production decisions move to him, while Alex Oldfield retains a strategic link from his new role as head of commercial at parent company The Evolve Group.
How much did The Evolve Group pay for Print On?
The price was not disclosed. Print On’s turnover is approximately £3.5 million on roughly 20 staff. Small commercial printers in the UK typically transact at around 0.4 to 0.7 times revenue or 4 to 6 times EBITDA, which would put a plausible range somewhere between £1.4 million and £2.5 million, but the actual figure has not been confirmed by either party and could fall outside that window.
What does The Evolve Group actually do?
The Evolve Group is a UK brand activation and experiential agency led by managing director Natalie Magee. It builds physical brand experiences for clients including Pernod Ricard’s Absolut at Chester Racecourse and Brown-Forman’s el Jimador and Jack Daniel’s brands at the Northern Restaurant and Bar Show 2026. Services span strategy playbooks, creative design, event builds, and now in-house commercial print through Print On.
The bigger picture sitting underneath this single Stockport deal is a UK print sector quietly reshaping itself around the parts of retail spending that have not been eaten by digital substitution. Brand activation, in-store experiential, and physical POS are growing while newsprint dies. Owners who see that early get bought into agency platforms with growth runway. Owners who do not, exit through administration. The Evolve and Print On combination is a clean example of the first path.
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