The Interprint’s Operations Director and long-serving BSGA board member talks about the importance of community, standards and looking after the planet
In 1989, Jeff Bufton and a friend, both in their early twenties, looked at the signage trade and saw the potential to make a living from it. He had done computer studies at school, so the new vinyl cutting technology coming through felt like a natural fit. They picked up a few agencies, secured Reading Football Club early on, and Jeff spent the next 22 years or so making signs. What eventually nagged at him was the picture of where it all led. “I didn’t want to be an old man making signs,” he says, having done one too many vans for tradesmen in their fifties and sixties.
What followed reads like a guided tour of the industry’s back rooms. Point of sale, Chapter 8 kits, a couple of company mergers, working on mega events including three Olympic Games across London, Athens and Rio, the O2 account at a Windsor agency, an exhibition firm, even a spell with a house builder signage producer. Then came Signs Express at the start of 2018, where he stayed for eight years and where most people will know him from. Since last November he has been Signage Operations Director at Interprint, part of the ESP group in Swindon, running two sites as the large format arm of the wider print group.
The detail man
Ask Jeff what he is good at and he does not reach for the word headlines. “I do the objective detail and that objective detail allows me to see where things are going wrong,” he explains. Jeff is the operations man rather than the salesman, by his own admission able to talk all day but never one for cold calling. Having worked every touch point himself, from the initial enquiry through artwork, production, finishing, fitting and the commercial side, he can spot the gaps because he has worked in all of them.
That suits the job in hand. Interprint has been trading for over 40 years, which Jeff takes as a sign of a solid business, but a growing company inside a larger group brings plenty of activity at once. His first eight months have been about stabilising things, breaking down silos and managing change while the work keeps moving out of the door. Six hundred posters can arrive over a weekend and be gone by the next day. “It’s like snakes and ladders,” he notes, with quick wins followed by the occasional issue you thought you had resolved sliding back down the board. A new CNC, a new large format inkjet printer and four or five new staff have helped move things forward.
Why no signage business should go it alone
Jeff joined the BSGA technical committee in early 2018 and took the compliment without quite knowing what it meant. What he found was a room full of credible people quietly driving standards, the sort of work most sign-makers never see. “The magic sign fairies,” he calls them, the people having the European conversations and shaping the British standards the rest of the trade relies on.
His message to the thousands of small independents out there is simple. Most have their family and a couple of friends in the trade and no real reference point. A franchise has a network behind it; the independent sign shop does not. Membership gives you someone to call when a supplier issue or a quality control problem leaves you stuck, and a set of standards so nobody is reinventing the wheel. He keeps returning to BS 559, with fresh news on it expected over the coming months, and to the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. Plenty of owners simply do not know what they do not know. “All of a sudden you’ve resolved an issue which you didn’t quite realise you had and you’ve got some people who actually have got your back,” he reflects.
What the next five years look like
Jeff does not predict anything dramatically new, more a continuation of what is already under way. Automation and AI will keep advancing, and Interprint is already using AI in its quoting, which he expects to reshape how customers receive a price and how quickly files reach the printer. Vinyl is slowly giving way to textiles and flatbed work as the medium matters less than the message on the substrate. Digital signage, barely finding its feet around 2010, will appear on far more high street fascias and internal displays within a decade, a point made for him by the rolling boards at this summer’s World Cup.
Sustainability sits across all of it, and here Jeff is refreshingly measured. Most of the push, he admits, comes from the firms themselves rather than their clients, who often still look only at the bottom line. Drop PVC where you can, use recycled content, keep things out of landfill, and sell the value rather than apologise for the cost. For a man who started out cutting vinyl in Reading and feared a future of making signs into old age, the variety has kept him interested and kept him useful. “I quite like this planet,” Jeff concludes. “It’s been quite good to me. I’m sure it’d be good to others for generations to come.”