They said we were mad...

As with anything, innovation doesn't just happen on it's own, but, sometimes it comes about from a simple idea, a small leap of faith and often, enough luck to be doing the right thing at the right time. That's just what happened with Inspirwood.

Before Inspirwood

Our founders, Pete and Kate Williams, were running a small freelance graphic design company called Inspirations, from a home office in Teignmouth by the sea. Established in 2004 after 15 years working for others, the two-person team consisted of Pete doing the creative work and Kate keeping everything organised. The whole ethos behind Inspirations was to be sustainable, ethical and creative with companies who felt the same. Our approach was recognised by winning various awards and gaining great clients on the way.

In 2012, our green mindset took us into wood as an alternative option to plastic and paper, both of which are highly wasteful in terms of energy and water and of course damaging to the environment.

Then...

It all started when we 'saved' some wood veneer from a customer's skip, and wondered what we could do with such a tactile product. We decided to print up some business cards for ourselves on the wood, just because, well, why not! Over the next few months, people we gave these cards to where asking where they could get some as well - finding a company to do these proved impossible, so we decided to explore doing them in house ourselves.

Now...

Fast forward to now, and we are working with some of the most forward thinking companies around the globe (and closer to home), and our product range has grown into pretty much anything. From our humble beginnings with wooden business cards  we now print on virtually any wood with quantities from 1 to 1 million units including wooden signs, wooden labels, wooden tags, and wooden wedding stationery with a full carpentry division in house too, working with private clients and direct to the marketing, events, signage and printing trades.

From the start, we were the only company in the UK to do this, and still today, we are at the forefront of a new industry, leading the print on wood technology and processes.

What's more, we still have the same environmental and ethical view points in our day to day business operations from when we started. We were the first and still the only FSC and PEFC certified wood print company, meaning we only source wood from sustainable sources, with definitely no wood coming from ancient forests. On top of this, we avoid plastic, we run our whole operations with renewable energy, we have very low waste with no landfill whatsoever, our staff are all local -  with over half choosing to walk to work, and we are still working out of a purposely renovated warehouse in Teignmouth. Our environmental way of working can be found here!

Our plans for the future...

We love challenges, so we have some amazing ground breaking ideas for how our projects can benefit people in the future. With the much needed reduction in Plastic - especially single-use plastic, our wooden printing will become even more important as climate change and the environment heads towards some very difficult cross-road decisions.

We aim to continue to push the boundaries of technology and creativity, to develop key solutions to the some of the most pressing needs that businesses and the public are going to face over the years to come.