Coral Print finds new home with Harry’s

Vrij Harry and Clive Cooper were childhood friends. Their parents were neighbours in St George’s Street, next to the small print shop started by the Harry family.

That friendship was the foundation for the recently announced sale of Cooper’s Coral Print to Harry’s Printers, a deal that Harry said took less than three weeks to pull together, with both owners coming out happy and staff cared for.

“The print industry has been in trouble for a while and that forced us to review our situation,” said Cooper.

“We are not in Harry’s league and a sale was a sensible option. I must stress that it was not a liquidation.” 

Cooper said all 30 staff received full retrenchment packages.

“Some of them have been with us since Len, my late brother, and I bought Coral in 1992.

“At our busiest time we employed over 60 people. Some of our people are now with Harry's.”

Harry said he and Cooper had been competitors for many years “but never enemies”.

“I remember playing with Clive and Len at Coral.

“We would collect scraps of paper from the printing works and use it to play money games.”

East Londoners will remember Len as the lead vocalist of the Dealians, a 1970s rock band that toured all around SA. He was also a city councillor.

While neither party will disclose the price or terms of the deal, it will not be scrap-paper play money.  

Harry said the sale did not include any printing machinery or the Coral premises.

“We have grown the printing company a lot over the past years. We are level 2 B-BBEE.

“We offer digital and wide-format printing, and have branched out into marketing and communication services, IT solutions and photobooks.”

Harry said his company had taken over Coral’s customer book, as well as the artwork, work in progress, product specifications and other files.

All contractual obligations remain in place.

“We are operating during the lockdown, servicing our essential services clients.”

Harry’s, a family business established in 1929, is the Eastern Cape’s biggest printing concern.

It employs 250 people from the East London head office and printers, with branches in King William’s Town, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria.

Cooper will continue to head Cooper and Company, the auditing firm he founded and which has been operating throughout his tenure at Coral.

Both his son and daughter are chartered accountants.

“My only real regret is retrenching staff, which I did not enjoy doing,” Cooper said.

“Coral was more like a family and we had a wonderful team.

“We never had a strike and never retrenched people, until now, that is.

“Coral was good to all those involved for 30 years.”