Thirty-five years of getting the colour right.

It started with one press

Gerry and Deirdre Morgan started Inkspot in 1991 with a single machine on Grove Road and no particular plan beyond doing the work properly. It ran as a general commercial printer for the best part of two decades and it came through the recession without a loss-making year, which is not something every printer of that era can say.

The turn to packaging

The pivot came from a plain observation: the presses already installed in Finglas could run food cartons and sleeves. Same machines, different industry, and a customer with far less tolerance for error. Packaging does not forgive a bad run the way general print does. It is on a shelf, beside a competitor, under lighting nobody chose, and it is either right or it is a recall. Around ninety-five per cent of what leaves the building is now packaging.

Brand colour, set in PantoneLIVE

Inkspot works with PantoneLIVE, the cloud library of digital colour standards from Pantone and X-Rite that brand owners increasingly use to specify their colours. A Pantone number on its own describes ink on Pantone’s own paper. PantoneLIVE goes further: alongside each master colour it holds dependent standards, measured values for how that colour should read on a particular board, ink and print process.

For a brand, that means the carton we print, the sleeve from another supplier and the point-of-sale from a third are all measured against the same numbers, held in one place, rather than against a fan deck that fades or a sample somebody kept in a drawer. We take the standard for your colour on your board, measure against it on press with a spectrophotometer, and show you the result. If a colour cannot be reached on a given substrate, PantoneLIVE shows that at the artwork stage, while it is still cheap to change.

A family business, second generation

Inkspot has been Irish owned and family run for thirty-five years and is now into its second generation. That matters more than it sounds. Every packaging buyer eventually asks the same question: will this supplier still be here for the reprint? A family business answers it by continuing to exist. The people who set your job are usually the people who ran it last time, and they can tell you why it ran the way it did.

Where things stand

The company now operates from two units on the same Finglas estate, with printing, design and repro based in Unit 38 and finishing operations in Unit 39. Continued investment in both equipment and finishing capabilities has allowed the business to bring key processes in-house, including foil blocking, embossing, window patching and die cutting, reducing reliance on external suppliers while strengthening quality control and turnaround times.

A Local Enterprise Office expansion grant supported the creation of four full-time positions during the pandemic, with the company ultimately exceeding its forecast targets by 20%. This growth and resilience were recognised in 2022 when the company was named the winner of the Dublin City Enterprise Award.

More recently, the business has successfully secured tenders in Northern Ireland, marking an important step in expanding beyond the domestic market. With a strong production base, an increasingly comprehensive in-house finishing offering and a proven track record of growth, the next stage of the company’s development is to build on this momentum and expand into export markets.