MPS Brand Guidelines: The 1996 Dutch Servo Flexo Press Maker Restarted in Arnhem

Three Stork engineers and a garage.

MPS started in a garage in the Netherlands on 1 November 1996. According to a 2021 anniversary history published by FINAT, the European label association, two former employees of the Dutch engineering group Stork, Bert van den Brink and Eric Hoendervangers, set out to build an improved flexo press and, with a third Stork colleague, Henk Wientjens, founded the company as Multi Print Systems. The initials stayed; the long name did not. In FINAT’s account Hoendervangers was the commercial force of the trio, while Wientjens led research and development from the start until 2019.

The same history says the founders built what it calls the first servo-driven flexo press for narrow-web printing, and that the trio sold their first machine in 1997 to a printing house in Sweden, a press it described as still running in 2021. The company moved from the garage to larger premises in Nijmegen in 1997, and in 1999 took over the Sloka machine factory in Didam, whose staff joined MPS. Over the following years it opened offices in Germany, the UK, North America and Asia and sold through a network of agents. By its 25th anniversary, Hoendervangers told FINAT, more than 800 MPS machines were running in production around the world.

In 2015 MPS moved its headquarters from Didam to a new building in Arnhem. FINAT reported in May that year that the building would bring manufacturing and operations under one roof, with an expertise and technology centre for press demonstrations and operator training. Van den Brink, then a director, said sustainability was one of the main reasons for the move; the new assembly hall used LED lighting and was laid out for lean production, with several presses built at once on parallel lines. In 2021 FINAT named Atze Bosma as chief executive and Michiel Borst as finance chief, and said the two remaining founders would step back into advisory roles from January 2022.

Servo drives, many processes, one data story.

MPS built its name on servo-driven narrow-web presses for label converters. When its Arnhem headquarters opened in 2015, guests were shown the EF multi-substrate flexo press and the then-new EB flexo label press. By October 2025, FINAT described MPS as a maker of servo-driven narrow-web printing and converting systems working in flexo, offset, screen, gravure and hybrid digital-flexo printing.

The current website, run by MPS Printing, lists the EF next generation, the EF SYMJET hybrid press, EXL-Offset and EXL-Packaging, and groups its applications into labels and packaging: self-adhesive, shrink-sleeve, in-mould and multi-layer labels on one side, laminate tubes, flexible packaging, blister and lidding on the other. It also lists converting modules, among them cross-over units, laminators, embossing, hot and cold foil and a quick-change die, and it promotes small operator details such as a slide-out ink drawer meant to make ink changes faster between jobs.

The brand’s voice has leaned on data since June 2021, when, FINAT reported, MPS launched new branding around the message “Connect to Grow.” Bosma compared label and packaging printing to Formula 1, where performance is measured closely, and pitched advice from data analysts and print managers built on figures taken from the press. The service is called MPSConnect; the company says hundreds of sensors on each press record events in real time so converters can spot bottlenecks and cut waste. Alongside it runs a second line, “Beyond the Machine,” and a short list the company calls “MPS in 5 Words”: high quality, dedicated, curious, smart and innovative.

How label press makers present themselves.

Label presses are built for converters, the printers who turn reels of paper and film into the labels on bottles, jars and cartons. A narrow-web press is usually a long inline machine: the web unwinds at one end, passes through a row of printing units, often with UV curing between them, then through foil, varnish and die-cutting stations before the finished labels are rewound as a reel at the other end.

The makers present themselves through that machinery. Their brochures and websites show the web path running from unwinder to rewinder, rows of identical printing units, die stations and close-ups of printed label reels, and they describe presses by print width, the processes a line can combine and the materials it can run, from self-adhesive paper to film and carton.

Much of the selling happens in person. Makers run demonstration halls where converters can watch a press run their own jobs: Gallus says its Experience Center in St. Gallen covers nearly 2,500 square metres and also shows partner machines, and Nilpeter listed technology centres in Denmark, the United States, Thailand, India and Brazil in 2019. Gallus asks converters who want a live demonstration to arrange it through Heidelberg’s local sales and service units.

Trade fairs set the rhythm of launches. Labelexpo, held in Brussels for Europe and in Chicago for the Americas, is where many presses are first shown: Nilpeter launched its FA-Line at Labelexpo in Brussels in 2005, according to FLEXO magazine. The makers in this guide range from family companies to subsidiaries of larger press groups, and each guide sets out who founded the brand, who owns it now and what rests only on the company’s own word.

A bankruptcy, then a buy-out.

The company did not reach its thirtieth year in its original form. On 23 October 2025, four Dutch entities, MPS Holding, MPS Systems, MPS Service & Commissioning and MPS Supply Chain, applied for a provisional suspension of payments, the Dutch surseance van betaling, FINAT and the Flexographic Technical Association’s FLEXO news reported; chief executive Michiel Borst said the aim was to gain time to strengthen the company’s finances, and the court-appointed administrator expected the process to take no more than a month. Service and commissioning work was meant to carry on in the meantime. It did not hold. Board Converting News reported on 17 November 2025 that the District Court of Gelderland, by an order dated 28 October 2025, had declared the entities bankrupt, and that production, deliveries and services were suspended; the company said a rescue plan had collapsed at the last moment.

A restart followed within weeks. On 16 December 2025 FLEXO news reported that MPS Printing had completed a management-led buy-out led by Richard Miedema, Michiel Borst, Nick Tyrer and co-founder Bert van den Brink, with a plan centred on service, technical support and selective new equipment sales. MPS Printing B.V. gives Arnhem as its headquarters. Its website says more than 850 MPS machines have been installed in over 100 countries; trade reports in October 2025 gave more than 800 installations in more than 60 countries.

For a design guide, MPS shows how an engineering brand built on initials can carry its name through a change of company. Compare Gallus and Nilpeter, two other label-press makers in this collection. For this guide we use a deep teal, graphite and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep MPS’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.