Mansfield on the Move - Grow
Case study
Family owned and run, Linney is one of the most prominent home-grown business success stories – not just in Mansfield, but across the East Midlands.
What began as a bookshop in Mansfield town centre in 1851 is today an advanced marketing company that invests heavily in people and technology to support the work it does for some of the most well-known brands in the world – ranging from insight driven creative design, to an automated warehouse where wheeled robots collect products to be sent to customers.
It has also become Mansfield’s largest private sector employer, with around 1,000 people working across a business centred on a large site on Adamsway. Its creative, high-tech approach has attracted talented young people who might otherwise have left for jobs or university courses that took them away from the area.
The company describes itself as ‘restless since 1851’, which highlights its defining characteristic – the way it has constantly evolved and reinvented itself as time, technologies and markets have changed.
After the initial bookshop, it became a stationer, a newspaper publisher, a printer, and is today an integrated marketing services business – led by the fifth and sixth generations of the Linney family.
Michael Fisher, of Linney Create, says: “What we do here is amazing. But so many people in Mansfield probably don’t know about it, because we are a subtle family business and have a long-term view on life.”