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In Conversation With... Paul Lavery
Budget-ary Controls Paul Lavery’s incredibly low PR profile is somewhat at odds with the commanding position the business he started with his brother Martin over 40 years ago has built up over the years. Having recently sold a 51% stake of the wholesale group Budget Greeting Cards to Canadian private equity company, Ardenton Capital, PG persuaded Paul to come out of the shadows. ‘Windfall for gift boss Paul Lavery’ was the headline that appeared in the Sunday Times on March 10, breaking the news that Ardenton Capital, a Canadian private equity company, had acquired a controlling stake in Budget Greeting Cards, the UK’s largest wholesaler of greeting cards and allied products. Having never courted publicity and in fact actively shied away from it, Paul Lavery, the company’s co-founder and a continuing significant shareholder, found himself in the limelight whether he liked it or not. So, ‘in for a penny in for a pound’ (and those early pennies will have stacked up to make a few pounds!) for the first time, PG’s requests for an interview were met. As well as being good news for Paul and his elder brother Martin, Ardenton’s attraction to the Budget business and subsequent Top: Paul Lavery still passes every one of the 1,300 greeting card designs BGC Studios creates. Above: The BGC Studios generate a great diversity of greeting card designs, some of which are then also translated onto wrap. Above right: The front part of Budget’s Manchester branch. Left: Budget sells almost 100 million greeting cards every year.
clinching of the deal is also something of a positive thumbs-up for the greeting cards sector, giving credence to the robustness of the market. Greeting cards have always been key to Budget’s business. It now sells almost 100,000 greeting cards through its eight branches annually, accounting for 49% of the group’s turnover. Significantly, while a major customer of wholesale card publishers, some 70% of all the cards Budget now sells are exclusive to the wholesaler, the vast majority (some 1,300 designs) of which are created by the company’s own inhouse studio (which employs
14 people based in its Manchester HQ) and are published under its BGC Studios marque. In what Paul describes as “the best thing that has ever happened to the business” was the demise of wholesale card publisher Kingsley Cards over 10 years ago, which enabled Budget to acquire many of the assets and stock, thereby providing a sizeable leg-up on the greeting card publishing ladder, providing an extra chunk of margin to the company as well as a USP which independent greeting card wholesalers did not have within their grasp. PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
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