ABG Brand Guidelines: The Burton Family’s Yorkshire Maker of Digicon & Vectra Finishing Lines

A Bridlington engineering firm with a family name.

ABG is the short name of A B Graphic International, a maker of finishing machinery for printed labels and packaging based on the East Yorkshire coast. The company says it “was established in Yorkshire by the Burton family back in 1954” and quickly put down roots “as an engineering operation.” The local newspaper The Wolds Weekly, reporting the firm’s seventieth anniversary in January 2025, gave the town: it was established in Bridlington by the Burton family in 1954.

The public record matches that date. Companies House shows the company incorporated on 15 September 1954 under the name Burton Engineering Company (Bridlington) Limited. It became Burton Engineering Company Limited in January 1995 and took its present name, A B Graphic International Limited, on 30 April 2003. The register classes its business as the manufacture of general-purpose machinery, and it lists several directors named Burton among its current officers.

So the label-machinery brand grew out of a general engineering firm, and the family name sat on the company for almost fifty years before the ABG name replaced it. The company still stresses that origin: “We remain 100% family-owned,” its website says, and among its stated values is “Proud of our Yorkshire roots.” It gives its slogan as “Engineering tomorrow’s solutions today.”

Digicon and Vectra.

ABG’s machines sit after the press. Label converters print a reel of labels, and finishing equipment then varnishes, laminates, foils, die-cuts, strips the waste matrix and slits and rewinds the web into finished rolls. ABG makes several families of this equipment, and two names lead its range.

The first is Digicon. The company calls the Digicon Series 3 its “flagship machine,” describes it as modular, and says it works roll-to-roll or roll-to-sheet behind digital label presses, in a standard 330mm web width and in 430mm and 540mm versions for wider webs. Its modules, as the company lists them, include a semi-rotary die-cutting system it calls Fast Track, a hot-foil and embossing unit called Big Foot, a flatbed screen-printing module for raised varnishes and a lamination-in-register unit.

The second is Vectra, a line of automatic turret rewinders, which rewind finished labels onto cores and change reels without stopping the line. In March 2022 the European label association FINAT published ABG’s announcement that Vectra had passed 2,000 installations worldwide. Alongside them the company lists the DigiLase laser die-cutting system, the Fleyevision inspection system, shrink-sleeve and RFID converting lines, and a sheeter.

The FINAT item described the company as a digital finishing equipment manufacturer with its headquarters in Bridlington. Its machine shop, on the same industrial estate, made the aluminium plates used across its finishing machines, and its turret-rewinder production had been based since 1995 at a smaller site at Middleton on the Wolds. That year the company had bought a third manufacturing site on the Kelleythorpe Industrial Estate near Driffield, to be ready in early 2023; Richard Knight, then chief executive, said the move would bring key parts of the business under one roof. The announcement gave the new site an extra 40,000 square feet, with room for parking, lorry access and new offices, and plans for a showroom where customers could see the machines; Matt Burton, the global sales director, said the expansion was key to keeping up momentum.

Design and documentation.

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.

Made on the Yorkshire coast.

The move happened. The Wolds Weekly reported in January 2025 that ABG had moved its Vectra turret rewinder production from Middleton-on-the-Wolds to Kelleythorpe, into the former Alfred Bekker factory it had bought in January 2023, remodelled and extended. The move doubled the space for that manufacturing, to 4,994 square metres, the paper said, and brought the company’s two machine shops, previously at Middleton and at its Carnaby site, together in one place, freeing space at Carnaby for more manufacturing. Simon Nadin, by then chief executive, was quoted on the investment in new machining technology.

The company lists four manufacturing and sales facilities: Carnaby and Kelleythorpe in the UK, Baesweiler in Germany and Girona in Spain, with sales and service offices in North America, the Netherlands, Spain, France and Chile and distributors elsewhere. It says it employs more than 450 people.

Its identity is built on initials. The full company name, A B Graphic International, is long; the brand on its website and in trade announcements is ABG, and its product names are short engineering words — Digicon, Vectra, DigiLase, Fleyevision. Its five stated values are customer focus, “One Team,” “Solutions Driven,” integrity and “Above and Beyond,” a phrase it also applies to the service experience it says ABG has become known for. Its website is published in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch and Polish.

For a design guide, ABG shows how a family engineering firm can carry a regional identity into a global machinery brand through three initials and plain product names. Compare Edale, another English maker of narrow-web machinery, and BOBST, whose equipment also converts printed packaging. For this guide we use a harbour navy and a Wolds green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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