Mesh PVC in 2026? There Are Holes in the Idea

One of the evolutions of Venture Banners from the humble beginnings of my garage is that we now have a company that looks after our PR. They look after the social media posts and give us a voice for our opinion within editorial pieces in the trade magazines.

Towards the end of 2025, they asked me for my predictions for the coming year, to be published in a blog. The government's very own chess champion had just given her second budget and all I could think was ‘we’re all doomed’ but I did my best to keep it light with something about the growth in fabric products.

But something more interesting was going on in the courier world, and I think it would've been more accurate to have given a prediction on that. I’ve written several articles about couriers over the last few years and I would suggest that couriers and the associated issues are the single biggest daily challenge faced by Venture, after the current government's pro-business policies of course.

It all came about by talking to a FedEx employee some months ago, he said that FedEx were having problems buying, of all things, planes! And the reason he gave was that quietly, in the background, Amazon was busy filling Boeing’s order book.

That can mean only one thing: Amazon is going to challenge the incumbent logistics players at their own game. As anyone who has bought from Amazon will know, the infrastructure is already in place, and they’re really good at it. All they need to do is scale it up, maybe buy some planes.

If I were DHL or UPS, I would be concerned at this development and start to look at ways of diversifying, because once that juggernaut starts rolling, there’ll be no stopping it.

That brings me neatly onto Venture’s own direction of travel over the last few years. You’ll have noticed in that time how fabric print and products have become much more prevalent in our material and products line up. There are several very good reasons for this and not least is the fact that it is so simple to transport.

With fabric prints you just put it in a postal bag or box and send it out, with pretty much any courier.

No more two-metre long cardboard tubes wrapped in bubble wrap, which are classed as "ugly freight" (and charged as such) by the last remaining courier to handle this type of package: DX.

So over time at Venture, we’ve been working quietly in the background on fabric alternatives to our PVC based materials.

And this makes perfect sense - apart from the courier savings for us and our customers, fabrics are 100% polyester and can be recycled (and even if you were to throw them in landfill they don’t release the harmful chemicals PVC products release).

In late 2025, we spent a few months testing a Fabric Mesh material with a plan to eventually phase out PVC Mesh in favour of the fabric equivalent. We did a soft-launch in February, which went very well and already shown how receptive our customers are to this new generation of material. Phase one was complete, and the ball was finally rolling of the gradual shift to a fabric mesh.

And then, this year, both of our VUTEk GS machines (which print our PVC materials) broke down… pretty seriously. In their defence, they are fourteen years old and have been absolutely amazing workhorses, but as part of the phase-out plan, we were considering retiring them at some point anyway.

Luckily we have seven VUTEks in total, so Standard PVC was moved immediately onto one of the VUTEk h5 printers. But to print Mesh PVC on an h5, you need to be using a liner, and that's a hassle, especially considering the volumes we do.

We had a desicion to make: spend thousands repairing old machines that are no longer supported by the manufacturer, to prolong the selling of a material we had already begun the process of phasing out. Or concentrate on the future: Fabrics - and that's exactly what we chose to do.

Luckily, there's absolutely no downside to Fabric Mesh Premium and to sweeten the transition, we've even managed to reduce the price from £12.00 m² to £10.50 m² - now less than the cost of the PVC Mesh, and matching the cost of our Standard PVC. You’ll notice your carriage costs are much better on Fabric Mesh Premium as well.

Comparing to when I was originally asked for my predictions on the then-upcoming 2026, now with our phasing-out of PVC Mesh now completed in just over six months and earlier than we expected, who knew we'd end up with prices on mesh banners and prices on their delivery both coming down. That's a win for anyone's budget.