Founded in 1995 by brothers Rob and Phil Newton, PSE (originally PJR print) started out selling printed letterheads from a barn in Worcestershire and it is now one of the UK’s foremost specialist direct mail agencies.
How?
Well, if you’ve met Rob or Phil, then you’ll know exactly how PSE has not only lasted 30 years but has grown and thrived. Whoever you are – client, supplier, employee – you quickly realise they’re engaged, they want you to succeed, they care. And that is the secret to their success.
The answer is always yes!
The last 30 years have been a story of innovation, reinvention and an uncanny knack of knowing how to stay ahead of the curve. But let’s start at the beginning where, armed only with a landline, a fax and the business pages, the early years were spent capitalising on advances in printing that allowed business forms to be personalised.
With a growing belief that they could deliver whatever clients asked for, the company grew into supplying print, gaining some big companies on the way. Rob explains, “Our dad always said, go for the bigger companies, it might be harder but there’s more money and so we always had faith we could work at that level.” Phil adds, “Our mentality was that the answer is always yes and we would then make sure we delivered what we said we would. It’s an ethos we still live by.”
From supplying print, Rob and Phil recognised the need to add more value for clients and so PSE moved into print management. Multisite companies especially benefitted from their renowned print audits – standardising print needs, identifying cost savings and helping with brand cohesion. As Rob explains, “I carried out lots of print audits at that time, collecting every bit of print I could find and laying them all out. Companies would often be so embarrassed by the mishmash of print and inefficiencies I’d found they couldn’t wait for us to sort it out.”
Making every vote count.
Wanting to make things work better, caring about every bit of print and making sure they took clients to a better place drove many of PSE’s achievements, one of which was the invention of the postal vote. Having received an enquiry from a borough council to print postal vote documents and envelopes, Rob discovered an unusable system using incomprehensible forms, “They told me almost no postal votes were filled in correctly and so didn’t get counted. I wasn’t surprised, but I really wanted to sort it out.” And sort it out they did, the simple, user-friendly form and mailer system they created meant that every single postal vote cast at that election was counted and it is still in use today.
Likewise, a chance chat at Hotel Chocolat revealed a problem supplying their new network of stores with print – so PSE designed a digital print management system. Phil told us, “For us it’s all about people, always has been. We get to know people, their businesses and what they need. We care about their success, so if they have a problem, we like to come up with answer.”
Removing the hurdle
As the world locked down and business ground to a halt, Rob and Phil did not waste their unexpected downtime. Instead, they took the opportunity to ask each other – if we were starting from scratch today, what would we do?
The answer to that question was a natural progression of what they had been doing, to position direct mail alongside digital marketing, not as an afterthought. Phil explains, “The print industry doesn’t make direct mail easy, there are maybe 25 to 30 steps involved in creating a campaign and that puts many businesses off. Compared to say a pay-per-click campaign you can get up and running in an hour, it’s so complicated. And yet direct mail remains a highly effective marketing channel that is measurable in a way that digital struggles with. We wanted to remove that hurdle”
And so, PSE the agency has evolved to do just that. What Rob and Phil had identified was the skill gap that exists when it comes to direct mail. As Rob says, “If you’ve done a marketing degree in the last 20 years, you won’t have been taught much about direct mail. It’s new to a lot of people, but it’s an old, highly effective channel and we’ve been doing it for 30 years.”
Six steps to success
Drawing on all their experience and expertise learned from working with some of the fastest growing brands in the UK, the brothers developed an exclusive six step process – a guide to help brands succeed with direct mail that is designed to repeat and improve through results-driven learning.
PSE has recruited a team of experts in each field of the 6 step process – including data management, creative, print and campaign analysis – further reinforcing their position at the forefront of direct mail in the UK.
The last 30 years have certainly been a long and eventful journey. A great deal has changed but, as the brothers say, a lot has stayed the same, “The company may have evolved, but we still have the same end goal we always did – we’re doing it for the client, we’re doing it to add value. We’re not a cost to our clients, we’re here to help them achieve their goals.”
