Charles Rayner Ltd was established in 1991 as a POS printer servicing one of the larger retail chains. When this contract unexpectedly came to an end the Directors realised they needed to look for a niche market to guarantee the future success of the company in the highly competitive screen market.

They found this niche by taking on jobs that were either a little out of the ordinary or that other companies either struggled to print or could not achieve the print quality demanded by the client.

Steven Grimes, Technical Director of Charles Rayner explains. "Our whole philosophy can be summed up by a recent job undertaken for Weber Building Solutions. Our client had previously had display panels inkjet printed onto paper then mounted and laminated onto 3mm Foam PVC. They were however unhappy with the quality of print and vibrancy of colour, together with delaminating problems when the panels were thermally die cut. We were approached by the client to see if our specialist short run screen print techniques could solve their problem. We were confident we could achieve the print quality required but were concerned we would not be able to maintain this quality printing onto Foam PVC. Our previous experience had shown us that the surface of standard Foam PVC was not uniform and its roughness caused the ink dot to slightly expand and spider when printing the highest quality four colour work.

We contacted our print material supplier Pyramid Display and asked our account manager Caroline Sharp for advice. Caroline brought us in samples of Foamalite their stock Foam PVC. We were amazed at the smoothness and overall quality of the sheet compared to Foam PVC products we had seen on the past. Our print tests went very well and Weber were delighted with the results switching their preferred print method from ink jet to screen print which I suppose is quite unusual in the current climate as it's normally the other way round" Charles Rayner also specialise in print techniques using mirrored and thermochromic inks.