Twenty years ago, a truck needed signage and nobody could do it.
That is where Viviprint LTD began. Vivienne had no plans to enter the print industry. It was not a career she had mapped out or a business she had been building towards. Her father simply needed signage made for a truck, went looking for someone to make it, and came back empty-handed.
So he made her an offer.
“If I buy the machine, will you do it?”
She said yes.
One machine, one job at a time
There was no plan beyond that first job. There was a machine, a small premises, and work that needed doing. What followed was the ordinary, unglamorous business of learning a trade properly. Getting the ink right. Getting the finish right. Doing the job again when it was not right the first time.
Word moved the way it does in Irish industry, which is to say slowly and solely on merit. One customer told another. A job done well led to a harder job. The harder jobs are what taught us the most.
What twenty years actually buys you
Experience in this trade is not abstract. It is knowing which material will survive a washdown and which will lift at the edges within a year. It is knowing that a two-part ink mixed fresh on the day behaves differently to one mixed the day before. It is knowing when to tell a customer that the process they have asked for is the wrong one for their job.
That knowledge only comes from two decades of running the work through the shop and paying attention to what came back.
Today Viviprint manufactures durable labels, engraved traffolyte, graphic overlays, membrane switches, safety signage and direct to surface screen printing on plastics, metals and glass. We work with manufacturers, OEMs and engineering companies across Ireland, in sectors where a marking failing is not a cosmetic problem but a safety one.
Screen printing is the oldest form of printing there is, and we are one of the few left providing it in Ireland.
Still investing
The photograph above is a new machine going in. Twenty years after the first one arrived because a truck needed signage.
That feels like the right way to mark the anniversary, not by looking backwards, but by continuing to do the thing that got us here. Investing in the capability to do the work properly and at volume.
The equipment changes. The standard doesn’t and neither does staff morale!
Thank you
To every customer who has trusted us with the final, critical detail of their product, thank you. To the team who make it happen daily, and to the suppliers who have stood by us, thank you.
Twenty years ago someone asked a question and got a yes. Everything since has followed from that.
Here is to the next twenty.
Viviprint Industrial Church Street, Rathkeale, Co. Limerick 069 64911 | 087 4105998 info@viviprint.ie