The United States is in a financial crisis on par with the tumultuous economic times of the 1930s. And while it is impacting automakers, retailers, financial institutions and many segments of the print industry, some trade-only printers seem to be getting by unscathed.
“The economic recession has not affected our business negatively at all; in fact, it has helped us expand our network of print buyers to over 50,000 nationwide,” said Zarik Megerdichian, CEO at Glendale, California-based 4over, Inc. “We have opened three new production facilities, ranging from 42,000 to 50,000 sq. ft. each, [and] hired about 150 new employees all within the last few months. We are discovering more and more resellers are taking advantage of our services now, in order to grow their business.”
Brad Wallans, vice president of Trade Secret Printing in Toronto, Canada, piggy-backed on those comments. “The biggest challenge we have is managing the growth, which has been double digits for over seven years now,” he stated.
Riverside, California-based CCI & PartnerPrinting.com also is experiencing growth despite the rocky economy. “We are moving to a larger facility and we are adding equipment and staff and we are increasing our production capabilities,” noted Dean Lerch, vice president – marketing.
And because these companies work closely with national print franchises, their businesses continue to thrive.
Forget about the days of competing with quick print retail chains, Megerdichian said they work together. “We do not compete with them since they sell direct to the end-users,” he proclaimed. “In fact, we complement their business by fulfilling their print needs. We provide print services to thousands of quick printers and print franchises.”
Lerch said PartnerPrinting.com was “one of the early pioneers of the online web-to-print wholesale ‘to-the-print-trade-only’ business models. We offered high-quality, full color offset printing; printed on multi-million dollar state-of-the-art sheet-fed offset presses, as an online wholesale resource exclusively for print resellers.” Lerch further explained that by printing in a gang-run format the company refined the process of putting multiple jobs on one large press sheet and calibrating its presses to ensure color consistency in gang-run environment. That’s important, he noted, because this color calibration process produces high-quality printing for a fraction of the cost of traditional stand-alone print runs.





