Our Story
Van driver. Evening college. Fax expert. Failed business. Dodgy employer on Panorama. A kitchen conversation with his wife and co-founder Sarah — the strategic driving force behind every major decision. A handshake that brought two Kent firms together. And, most recently, a Canon dealership born from her push for growth.
Kevin Bowden didn't start as an engineer. He started as a van driver for a photocopier company, delivering machines and learning the trade from the ground up. But he wanted more. So he went to college in the evenings, studying while he worked, determined to better himself.
When the company kept making false promises about offering him a proper technical role, Kevin took the qualification he'd earned and walked. He became a fax expert — back when fax machines were the cutting edge of office communication — and worked for a specialist firm before gradually moving into photocopiers as the technology evolved.
That progression, from van driver to college student to fax expert to copier engineer, taught him something that would stay with him for the next twenty years: if you want to get good at something, you put the work in. And if an employer doesn't value that, you find one who does.
By the time Kevin decided to start his own company, he'd been a photocopier engineer for two decades. Not a salesman. Not a manager. An engineer. The sort who turns up at your office, takes the machine apart, and doesn't leave until it's actually fixed.
He'd worked for company after company across the South East, and one thing kept bothering him: the gap between sales and service was a chasm. The sales team promised the world. The service team got called three days later by a customer whose machine still wasn't working. Nobody took responsibility.
Kevin didn't work like that. If he fixed your copier, it stayed fixed. That attitude made him popular with customers and slightly annoying to employers who preferred engineers to hit their call quota and move on.
About twenty years ago, Kevin tried to start a business with some friends. He was the technical one; they were supposed to handle the rest. It didn't go well. The friends let him down. The business collapsed. And Kevin came home one afternoon to find his wife Sarah had already worked it out: they were going to lose their house.
"We need to rent it out," she said. Just like that. That was Sarah: thinking three moves ahead while everyone else was still processing the first.
So they did. They moved out of their own home and into someone else's — a friend's place, as it happened. But the friend and his partner split up, the partner ran off with the landlord, and Kevin found himself living in a house with a fifty-year-old man who cried all the time.
That period taught Kevin something: when things go wrong, they can go really wrong. But you keep going.
Desperate to get back on his feet, Kevin tried something completely different: sales. It doesn't matter what he was selling. What matters is that he failed at it. Miserably.
"I'm too nice. I literally can't sell. I was getting leads for a sales buyer, and when he left, I had to sell directly. I found it tough because I'm very honest. I could only just about make the profit of the machine, and it weren't enough."
— Kevin Bowden
He wasn't cut out for squeezing margins. He was cut out for fixing things. So he went back to what he knew. He got back into service. He worked for three more companies, clawing his way back to stability one repaired machine at a time.
One of those companies turned out to be the worst he'd ever worked for. They were the sort of firm that ends up on BBC Panorama — the double-leasing scandal, where customers were tricked into signing two leases for the same machine, paying twice over, often without realising.
The bosses drove Ferraris. Flashy cars. "I thought it was a bit weird," Kevin says. He was an engineer earning an engineer's wage while the people above him were living like lottery winners. Something didn't add up.
Then, three years in, the company announced they were being bought out. But before the deal went through, they told the engineers to stop fitting parts. Just stop. Let the machines break. Don't maintain them. It was a cost-cutting exercise, stripping the business bare before the new owners took over.
Kevin's friend — another engineer, someone who'd watched the same things happen — decided he'd had enough. He walked out and started his own business.
Kevin watched his friend go. And he thought about his own history: the failed business, the lost house, the crying man, the humiliating sales job, the dodgy company. He'd failed before. Spectacularly. Publicly. Painfully.
But the timing was different now. He and Sarah were on their third round of IVF. It had worked. Their daughter was coming — and she remains their driving force to this day. Now fourteen, she is the reason they push harder, aim higher, and refuse to settle. Kevin thought: if I'm ever going to do this properly, it's now. Not in five years. Not when it's safe. Now.
He went home. He pointed at Sarah's stomach — that photo still exists somewhere, Kevin gesturing at the bump that would become their daughter — and he asked permission to try again.
She said yes. She always does. Because Sarah has never been the person who waits for permission to build something better.
The Van on Rochester High Street
Bowden Digitec started in 2012 with a Citroen Nemo van, a phone, and absolutely nothing else. No office. No staff. No marketing budget. Kevin would park on Rochester High Street, fix whatever copier someone called him about, and drive to the next job.
Sarah was a co-founder from day one. She holds a marketing degree and specialised customer service training — the kind that teaches you how to read a room, calm a frustrated client, and turn a complaint into loyalty. She has been the strategic driving force from the very start: pushing for growth when it felt risky, insisting on better systems when it would have been easier to coast, and always thinking three years ahead while Kevin handled the machine in front of him.
Kevin and Sarah have been married 23 years, and built every part of this business side by side. She is not "the marketing person" or "the admin." She is the reason Bowden Digitec grew from a van into a company recognised across Kent and London. Every major milestone — the ISO certifications, the FCA regulation, the WBS acquisition, the Canon dealership — carries her fingerprints.
Word spread. One customer told another. A fixed machine in Gillingham led to a referral in Maidstone. The business grew the old-fashioned way: by being genuinely good at the thing it claimed to do.
Fourteen years later, Bowden Digitec is a very different business. But it's still built on the same principle.
They have a sales team now — something Kevin resisted for years because he'd seen too many salespeople prioritise commission over customer care. But Sarah found people who shared their values: sell with understanding, not pressure. Recommend the right machine, not the most expensive one. Quote what it costs, not what you think you can get away with.
Both Kevin and Sarah are trained in NLP — Neuro-Linguistic Programming — and have invested in personal development courses across the years. They don't do it for certificates on a wall. They do it because understanding how people think, how they communicate, and how they learn is at the heart of everything Bowden Digitec does. It shapes how they hire, how they train, and how they serve customers.
When someone joins the team, Kevin and Sarah invest in them properly — because developing people is something they both believe in deeply. They have mentored apprentices, trained engineers from scratch, and watched people grow into roles they never imagined themselves in. That is not a side effect of the business. It is part of its purpose.
The engineers are manufacturer-trained across Epson, Sharp, Develop and now Canon. The company is FCA regulated and holds ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certifications.
Most of the growth still comes from referrals. Customers who've been with Bowden for five, eight, ten years recommend them to other businesses. That's not marketing. That's trust earned over time.
The Handshake
Eight months ago, a close friend came to Kevin with a proposal. He'd started a copier business years earlier — in fact, Kevin had helped him do it, encouraging him when he saw him watching Bowden's early growth with curiosity and ambition. The friend had built something solid: Wade Business Solutions, a well-known Thanet firm with good customers and a decent reputation.
Now he wanted to move on. And he didn't want to sell to just anyone.
"He knew I'd look after his clients. We've got the same ethics. The same values. We didn't want to slap our name over everything and pretend we invented it. WBS had a good reputation. We're building on it."
— Kevin Bowden, Managing Director
Kevin and Sarah bought WBS together. Sarah came in as a director alongside Kevin, the same way she has at Bowden from day one. The deal was done with a handshake — the kind of handshake Sarah always believed in: trust first, paperwork second. No lawyers drawing things out for months. All WBS engineers transferred across. The Manston office stayed open. WBS still trades under its own name.
A New Canon Dealership
Most recently, Bowden Digitec has been appointed a Canon dealership — another milestone Sarah pushed for when others might have stayed comfortable. She is never comfortable. She is always looking for the next strategic step, the next brand that will give customers better choice, the next move that keeps the business ahead rather than standing still.
Canon leads the market in office colour, and being trusted to represent that brand says something about how far the business has come from a single van in Rochester. It says something about two people who never stopped learning, never stopped developing themselves, and never stopped believing that a family business built on honesty and hard work can compete with anyone.
Customers get access to Canon's latest office colour multifunction range alongside the existing Epson, Sharp and Develop line-up: with the same independent advice, honest pricing and in-house engineers Bowden has always been known for.
Building in the AI Era
Kevin has never been the sort to sit still while the world moves on. Fourteen years after starting out with a Nemo van in Rochester, he's spent the last couple of years teaching himself modern AI development tools from the inside out — and he's now one of the most active builders on Lovable.dev, the AI application platform used by more than two million teams worldwide.
That's not a certificate on a wall. It's the reason Bowden Digitec now offers Business Technology & AI services alongside the print and leasing side of the business, and why our Bowden Labs tools are built and supported by the same people who look after your copiers. The technology moved on. So did Kevin.
Kevin & Sarah Today
Kevin and Sarah have been married 23 years and built Bowden Digitec together from the ground up as co-founders. Kevin knows every machine and every customer by name; Sarah is the strategic driving force — the one who saw the Canon dealership before anyone else did, who pushed for the WBS acquisition, who insisted on ISO and FCA standards when the business was still small enough to cut corners.
She holds specialised customer service training, and both she and Kevin are trained in NLP with years of personal development behind them. They don't collect qualifications for show. They study people: how they communicate, how they learn, how they respond to stress and to care. That is the psychology behind every apprentice they mentor, every engineer they train, and every customer they serve.
Their daughter — born after three rounds of IVF, now fourteen — remains their deepest driving force. She is the reason they refuse to settle, the reason Sarah always pushes for the next level, and the reason Kevin still fixes machines with the same care he gave his first. She is the future they are building toward.
It's a family business in the proper sense: soulmates and business partners, pulling in the same direction. When you call, you're speaking to people who care about getting it right. And when someone joins the team, Kevin and Sarah invest in them properly — because developing people is not a policy at Bowden Digitec. It is the point.
The business is growing across Kent and London, expanding its reach carefully, adding people who share the same ethos. Through it all, the core remains: fix it properly. Don't leave until it works. Charge fairly. Treat people like you'd want to be treated.
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One copier or a whole fleet, we're happy to talk it through. No pressure, no hard sell.
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