You have to treat it just right, otherwise it snaps, says Camilla Hadcock, co-founder in 2000 with husband Charles of Designbit, trading as Roach Bridge Tissues in Preston, north west England. Now based at the historic Roach Bridge Mill in nearby Samlesbury since 2008, she explains their organic route to the luxury market.
As printers and converters of tissue paper for wrapping and packaging purposes, Roach Bridge Tissues produces a range of luxury bespoke printed tissue paper, coloured tissue paper and white tissue paper – from a dramatically beautiful backdrop.
There has been a paper mill at Roach Bridge, on the River Darwen, since 1875. My grandfather owned and ran the mill for a period between 1950s and until his death in 1979. The paper mill was owned for a while by other parties, and in late 1999 it went into liquidation. Together with Charles we created a new company – Roach Bridge Tissues – to buy some of the machinery from the old paper mill to set up our business.
Now, we are celebrating 25 years of production. Our tissue type is wrapping tissue paper, so it is hard tissue paper. We import jumbo rolls of tissue paper and have four flexographic printing machines, three sheeting machines, guillotines and re-reelers on site. We print with water-based ink, using power generated on site with a hydroelectric turbine or solar panels. We can print up to four spot colours or full colour process. We are proud members of the Made in Britain organisation which brings together over 2200 manufacturing members who use a licensed mark to identify British manufactured products.
We hold stock in our warehouse of a variety of sizes, weights and colours of tissue paper, both in reel form for printing and converting, and ready packed into reams. Our printed paper is individually ream wrapped, packed with an average 500 sheets per ream. Plain white and coloured paper is packed with an average 480 sheets per ream in either single or double reams.
We are a bespoke printing company, so we are less about volume, more about quality and exclusivity. We import in the region of 260 tonnes per year, 85% of which we bespoke print, sheet and pack to send out within the UK for retail, e commerce and point-of-sales. A small proportion of the paper is sold without print and we sell some of our own printed designs too.
Our machines are quite old, and that suits our process: mechanical machines with fine gearing are ideally suited to printing tissue paper which needs just the right amount of tension to pull through the machines. You have to treat it just right, otherwise it snaps, it wraps around the print cylinder, it curls and it creases. It’s a definite tortoise not hare process.
We recognise that our operations influence the local, regional and global environment, and we continually manage the environmental impacts of our business. All Roach Bridge Tissues paper products are fully recyclable and biodegradable. Any surplus and wastepaper is fully recyclable and is regularly recycled and all wooden pallets are reused, recycled or restored by our supplier. Water containing ink waste is cleaned to remove the ink particles, in a bespoke filtering machine. Our packaging is fully recyclable and we encourage our customers to make the most of this feature.
Our MG tissue paper stock for printing is made from 100% recycled material and our MF tissue paper is made from pulp sourced from FSC-certified managed sources.
We have followed an organic growth path, a bit like the printing process slow and steady. As a small company supplying bespoke products we sell mainly to the luxury market. As brand awareness increases, more businesses are seeing the benefit of bespoke tissue paper, it is a relatively inexpensive way of adding a bit of luxury to packing, whether that is at point-of-sale or e commerce. Tissue paper has the advantage of being recyclable and lightweight, and as the paper we sell is FSC-certified, it’s also eco-friendly and sustainable.
