GDS Celebrates 20 Years of Business

Today sees a major milestone for GDS – it’s our Birthday!!

Twenty years of trading and the business continues to go from strength to strength. Here we take a look back at the journey so far!

“GDS was set up by myself with my then business partner Keith, as an authorised reseller for Oce wide format hardware and consumables. We soon established ourselves and provided a delivery and service throughout the North West. Selling into the CAD market place, we sold Drafting Materials, Diazo paper, plain papers and cut sheets.

This included the analogue Printers as well as HP entry level plotters including the HP500, HP750c, the HP 1050c and the HP 1055c.

Warrington was a great town to establish ourselves quickly and we soon provided a range of products including Epson, Canon and KIP amongst others. We very quickly started to provide consumables and printers across the UK, which included looking after several Key Accounts such as BNFL, Costain, Alfred McAlpine and Shell Oil” – Mark Walker, Founder and Managing Director, GDS.

Since these beginnings GDS has continued to grow and develop, moving into their current premises in Macclesfield back in 2011. The business then had expanded to the degree that bigger premises were required and the current premises were able to house the offices, a warehouse and the demonstration room for the large format printers. So the move was made! Many of you who have phoned into the office will have at some point spoken to Paula. Paula has been with GDS since the days that they were based in Warrington, and made the move over to Macclesfield with the company. You might say she is part of the furniture now! The team at GDS has continued to grow, with Mark’s wife Kate at the helm of the company- who is the fountain of knowledge in the office on all things wide-format, then David the Warehouse Manager and the latest addition is Tammy heading up the newly created Marketing Department.

From the early days of selling analogue printers and entry level plotters?GDS now sell Canon PRO-series Printers and state of the art HP MFPs as well as HP Latex.?GDS are currently one of Canon?s top 3 performing wide format UK partners and are a top 20 Canon European Premier Partner. GDS are a Canon Accredited Partner in all three channels of CAD, Graphics and Photo Select as well as also been a HP DesignJet specialist. GDS have worked hard to ensure the best value for their customers and this is reflected by their accolades.

The business has changed a lot since GDS first started trading. From mainly being on the road with reps selling into businesses, GDS now are primarily a web based business, with a lot of the business coming directly from online sales. GDS now are a multi-million pound a year operation and are set to grow even further!

GDS will be celebrating their Birthday in style- watch your inbox next week for details of the special offers we are going to be doing to celebrate.

Heres to continued success for GDS!

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