Our History

Our Founders: The Late Valentine "Tex" Surajdeen & his wife Polly Surajdeen.

"Tex" doing what he does best, Guillotine operator, printer extraordinaire.

The Late Valentine "Tex" Surajdeen outside the then newly established Texprint Limited.

Texprint Limited was established on January 27, 1986, by Valentine "Tex" Surajdeen and his wife Polly. They led the company until their unfortunate but peaceful demise early 2004.

A three-generations family enterprise, Texprint is one of Trinidad's leading printing houses, established more than 20 years ago by the late Valentine "Tex" Surajdeen, still known today as the country's "Guru of Print." He started the business together with his wife Polly and some of their children, after a long career at Superservice, formerly Express Print, a company that has been the first larger printing house in the Trinidad and Tobago over 30 years, when it was split up and sold in the late 1980s. Today, Texprint is one of the top ten commercial printers in the Caribbean.

Physically, Texprint is still a relatively small enterprise, housed in a two-story building not larger than 6,000 square feet in Barataria, the heart of the island's business community. It has several 1, 2 and 4-colour offset presses, Heidelberg and others, next to the company's very first letterpress beauties still being employed for creasing, die cutting, foil stamping and blind embossing.

What sets the company apart from others, though, is its unique mixture of a traditional family-style approach in customer relations, on the one hand, and a high-tech investment policy consistently targeting the wider enabling technologies, on the other. Over the years, the company's management has been very careful in shaping the organisation and preserving a balance between the occupation of key operational positions and the ability to privilege specific customer interests.

One of the company's slogans is to "always go the extra mile," while at the same time keeping a sharp eye on productivity and the overall profitability of the business.

At present, Texprint focuses on short run quality offset and digital printing, often enhanced with special coating and finishing techniques, for customers in the consumer retail industries, banking and insurance, advertising, publishing, and education sectors. The company prints point-of-sale materials, labels, brochures, booklets, newsletters, inlays, corporate reports, DVD jackets, leaflets, business stationery and the like.

When the Indigo was purchased, the big buzz was variable data printing and personalised mailings, but the Texprint crew was more interested in its ability to rapidly and economically print short runs in predictable quality. Says Dave Surajdeen, CEO, "We knew that personalisation would be a hard sell over here, but we were very keen on the Indigo's fast turnaround capability. In that respect we have not been disappointed."