Trimfold Envelopes Limited - Business of the fortnight

We have been located in Trim, Co Meath since 1971, and it offers an ideal location to service our customers throughout the 32 counties on the island of Ireland, as well as offering proximity to Dublin port for our regular deliveries of paper from our PEFC and sustainable suppliers throughout Europe and further afield and also for the volumes of produce we also export to the UK. Pre Covid-19, being based here in Co.Meath also meant we were in an ideal location to welcome visits from our clients throughout Irish corporate and pubic sectors who wished to come and visit our factory and see firsthand how their envelopes are produced, printed, packed and warehoused.

Trimfold Envelopes celebrated our 50th Birthday on July 12th 2021! We were established in Trim on July 12th 1971, when the company was started two local people. The Company was sold in 1995 to a Scottish paper mill, who subsequently sold it in 2006 to the largest envelope manufacturer in Europe, when we became a member of the Mayer Kuvert Group. Trimfold Envelopes is now the only envelope manufacturer left on the island of Ireland. There were four manufacturers and three brokers of product in the past, however this has changed over the years due to the rise in popularity of electronic communications and ever-increasing postal charges. In 2017 Trimfold Envelopes acquired Kilkenny’s Koverto Ltd, purchasing machinery and intellectual property and we established a sales and prepress design office in Kilkenny following that. This now leaves us the last manufacturer of our kind in Ireland.

Our long history, over half a century, of making envelopes gives us expertise on quick turnaround and a vast knowledge of suitable styles and how we can offer a client something they may not have thought of. Our huge range of envelopes and mail media includes everything from standard machine fill window envelopes to bespoke full colour printed envelopes as well as padded bags, board backed envelopes, coex mailing bags, boxes and all manner of mail products. We also offer a friendly and efficient service and will always do our best to fulfil a customer request.

We have joined Co Meath Chamber to join a lobbying group to promote our business and that of all the other businesses we rely on to stay in business ourselves. Being a member of a national organization offers us the opportunity to promote our goods and services to fellow members and also gives us a channel to voice to our concerns and requirements from government as required.

We are actively now expanding into mainstream paper-based packaging as we see this as an expanding market due to the unpopularity of plastic. Trimfold Envelopes has always exported a certain amount of its product into the UK market and as such we have always watched what was happening in that market with interest. In 2020 we developed a new product, Sanilope, which is a sanitized cutlery pouch, designed to address the challenges of Covid-19 for hospitality operators and all involved in the catering industry. It keeps clean cutlery safe and protected from Covid-19 and other casual contamination and can be printed with any kind of full colour branding or promotional messages. The paper used in the manufacture of Sanilope is treated with a sanitizing solution during the manufacturing process and the produced Sanilope are then packed into sanitized boxes by an operator wearing full PPE. We have created a video used as a TV commercial to promote Sanilope and have promoted it since its launch to catering industry wholesalers as well as our traditional printer customer base. Sanilope is suitable for use anywhere food is served by hospitality and catering suppliers whether they are in hotels, cafes, restaurants, bars, hospitals, nursing homes, schools, creches, colleges, prisons. Using Sanilope shows their customers they are serious about their safety.

Yes – our Sanilope product to hospitality and catering suppliers whether they are in hotels, cafes, restaurants, bars, hospitals, nursing homes, schools, creches, colleges, prisons – wherever food is served; It goes without saying we would also like to promote our business generally as Ireland’s largest manufacturer of envelopes – everyone uses envelopes and we are the national expert! Any shape, style or colour, printed, plain, window, no window, wages, correspondence, padded, hard backed – whatever you need an envelope for we will have it!

We pride ourselves both on our technical expertise as envelope manufacturers and on the level of service we offer our customers. We can manufacture any envelope product a customer may require for their business or direct mail or other promotion, and if they require something that we don’t manufacture we can source it for them. We also offer print services for all the envelopes and boxes and packaging we can offer customers. On the service side, we regularly receive glowing customer service comments from our trade customers and from the many public sector departments we supply. We have the OGP contract for the supply of envelopes for the Irish government and all government departments. We add value by always going the extra mile to at least meet a customer expectation and generally we aim to exceed them.

Know your market, have a business plan, ensure that you have enough working capital in place. So many start ups fail due to cash flow. Whatever your business, service, quality and value are the metrics that you will be judged on by your customers. Gross profit is what the banks and shareholders will judge the value of a company on! You will have to work hard for very little return at the start, but if successful it will be very rewarding.

COVID-19 has created unprecedented challenges not encountered by business since the 2nd World War. The crash in 2008 was a challenge for any business, what is different this time is the scale of the damage, both human and economic, caused by this pandemic. Businesses have closed that will never reopen. Unemployment will continue at record levels, in the past when things were bad at home, people emigrated, this is not an option now. Our business is deemed an essential service as we supply Government, HSE and Financial sectors, however like every business, this company has suffered losses due to lockdown and the fall off in business generally as the effects of the pandemic continue to impact every part of our lives. What have we done to try and mitigate the effects of these lockdowns? We furloughed staff during the first lockdown and have since moved on to have a portion of our staff work short time, this is to help with cashflow. Regarding the funding available for businesses like ours, to be honest it is difficult to actually qualify. The amounts are small, the interest rate on the EI loans are high, the grant element, looks great on the surface, but to access this you must give preferential shares as security. We are lucky in one sense that we are part of a Pan-European group and as such we have access to resources which would not be available if we were privately owned. We have also turned more towards manufacturing for the UK market to try and replace some of the volume we are losing on the Irish market. The unknown element in all of this is of course Brexit and the effects that will have on businesses. Trimfold Envelopes have opened Trimfold Envelopes NI, based in Newry, this will give us smoother access to markets in NI and the UK. At the end of the day we are in a fluid situation that changes daily, we can only do what we are in control of ourselves. The pandemic will take its course as will Brexit and business will have to adopt or die.

We recently celebrated the milestone of our 50th Birthday on July 12th 2021, and marked the day with a small function for employees onsite that afternoon, as due to Covid restrictions we could not host a larger event. We raised a glass of non- alcoholic bubbles to all of those who have worked hard to get the company to where it is today. To honour the occasion we erected six flagpoles at the factory and hoisted flags for Ireland, Leinster, Meath, Trim, Germany, the EU and a specially commissioned 50th Anniversary Trimfold Envelopes flag. As a longstanding employer in a small town, we are very mindful of our role within the community of Trim and it’s wider environs, and we are very involved in lots of community groups over the years either in the role of sponsor of funds, or of products or of using our profile to raise the profile of charities or community sports teams or arts groups in our area. Recently of note we sponsored the “Dear Dot” exhibition of memorabilia of Dot Tubridy, close friend of President John F Kennedy and his family, which was held in May 2019 in Trim Tourism Centre and organised by Tourism Network. The official opening was attended by two members of the Kennedy family, Courtney Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy, and her first cousin, Sydney Kennedy Lawford, daughter of Patricia Kennedy and niece of JFK and RFK and the official opening was also attended by RTE presenter Ryan Tubridy and featured on the RTE News. We also sponsored the elaborate costumes for the Trim town submission for the Bank of Ireland Enterprise Towns Awards in September 2018, where Trim Drama Group put on a pageant of the history of Trim in the grounds of Trim Castle for the attending judges. Special permission for the event was granted by the OPW. The same pageant was also recreated with permission from the OPW as part of the visit to Trim by the two members of the Kennedy family the following May 2019 as detailed above. We also worked closely as a sponsor with local group Trim Tourism Network and other community groups on many local festivals and events including the Salmon of Knowledge Festival, established in September 2016 and held every year since on the last pre-school Sunday in September. Like all Festivals in 2020 it was cancelled. We also were a main sponsor for the St John’s Summer Prom event in 2017 and the Braveheart 20 screening held in Trim in 2015, and of the Classical Christmas Concert held in the St Patrick’s Cathedral Trim each December since 2016. We look forward to events post Covid and hope our involvement in local groups and events will resume once they are able to take place once again.

Many thanks to Barbera Mellerick, who kindly supplied images and a recent Meath Chronicle article reflecting on Trimfold Envelope's celebrations of 50 years of business. To view this article online, please use the following link: https://www.meathchronicle.ie/2021/07/21/pushing-the-envelope-for-fifty-years/