They said we were mad...

As with anything, innovation doesn't just happen on its 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

Established in 2004 after 15 years working for others, our founders, Pete and Kate Williams, were running a small freelance graphic design company called Inspirations from their home office in Devon.  With Pete doing the creative work and Kate keeping everything organised, their whole ethos was to be sustainable, ethical and creative whilst collaborating with like-minded companies. Their approach was recognised by winning various awards and gaining great clients on the way.

In 2012, their green mindset lead them to 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 were 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 world and our product range has grown considerably. 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 trophies, with a full carpentry division in-house too.

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 as we did when we started. We remain the only FSC and PEFC certified wood printing company, meaning we only purchase wood from sustainable sources, with 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 and our staff are all local. We work 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 coming years.