Royal Label Company:
New generation of leaders step to the forefront
By Pamela Mieth
Two deaths that struck the heart of Royal Label Company a year ago haven’t stopped a triumvirate of siblings from plunging ahead to try to take the company to new heights.

Paul Clifford Jr., Eileen Clifford-Ezepik and Marychristine Clifford together are transforming Royal Label from a traditional label printer operation to a company making full use of its digital printing capability to offer variable data printing and other added services to a loyal client base while also touting the expanded services to prospective customers.

Their father, Paul Clifford Sr., was cutting back on the workload as company owner and president when he died a year ago. Within a month, Paul Ryan, who worked alongside the elder Clifford for 30 years as a sales rep and sales manager, also died following an illness.

The loss of the two men and their 70 years of collective experience could have finished the company and wiped it away from the label printing landscape. Fortunately, Paul Sr. had begun grooming his son Paul years ago for eventual succession as president.

While Clifford’s children still feel their father’s loss, they’ve put their personal grief aside in the professional world and together have focused on improving the legacy he left for them.

“My father was 64 when he died,” Marychristine said. “He had been cutting back on his workdays and had started taking longer weekends, as we all encouraged him to do. It was always understood that my brother would take the leadership of the company at some point. And my father had full confidence in Paul’s ideas and in which direction my brother thought the company should go.”

While working alongside his father, Paul Jr. convinced him that the company needed to invest in digital printing technology. His father supported the recommendation and in December 2001, the company entered the digital printing era with the purchase of an HP Indigo 1000 press. The purchase has been so successful, with long-time clients responding positively to the added value new equipment brings to them, the company is considering investing in the newer and faster HP Indigio 4000.

A start in 1958; future president and owner starts as part-time sales rep
Royal Label Co. was started in 1958 by Paul Clifford’s third cousin, Jack Moriarty. Clifford began as a part-time salesman while he was a student at Northeastern University and came on full-time after he graduated in 1964. In the late 1960s, Moriarty sold the business to Clifford and another partner, William Donovan. Donovan was the “inside guy,” said Eileen Clifford-Ezepik, who oversees administrative operations for the company, while her father focused on sales. Donovan retired in 1986 and Clifford became sole owner over a several-year buyout period.

Paul Clifford Jr. started in 1991 after he graduated from Boston College. He began as a customer service representative, worked in other facets of the company over time and served as general manager under his father. He will soon be named president.

Eileen Clifford-Ezepik joined the company in 1996 when her father needed an office manager. Marychristine Clifford joined in January 2002 after a sales career in another industry. Her main focus has been new business development since she came aboard.

Looking back, she’s thankful for the nine months that she got to work side-by-side with her father. “I always knew I would come into this industry,” said Marychristine, and when an opportunity came about at Royal Label, it was time.

There has been a good learning curve, she said, but she’s found it is not as different as she thought it would be. The principals of good business — chief among them, meeting your customers’ needs — remain the same regardless of the industry.

The company started on Causeway Street in Boston, near North Station, then moved to Freeport Street, near its current location, before becoming the first tenant in the Alsen-Mapes Industrial Park (AMIP) in Dorchester 1981. The company owns the 20,000-square-foot building, but its location in the industrial park represents a commitment to the city and its residents, including an agreement to have Boston residents make up at least 60 percent of its employees.

A good place to work
Royal Label has maintained a reputation as a good employer, demonstrated through low employee turnover, but also through its measures to ride out the economic downturn of the past few years without sacrificing personnel or performance.

Though the manufacturing industries were the first to get hit, Ezepik said, seeing it coming allowed the company to plan ahead, and make it among the first to start coming out of it.

She noted her brother was very proactive in finding creative ways to deal with the situation, receiving a working capital loan from the Boston Local Development Corp., part of Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s Back Streets program, and participating in a state Department of Employment and Training program that allowed businesses to lay off an entire department for one day instead of laying off one employee indefinitely. The DET pays for the day, and the employees get a day off. Royal Label press employees split the day so the presses could keep running.

With 25 employees and $3 million to $4 million in sales, investing about $600,000 to get into digital printing when they did was a “big risk,” Paul Clifford said, but one he believed in. “I felt very strongly this is where the industry is going,” he said. Royal Label was “one of the first in New England to invest in the technology and definitely one of the smallest.”

“Most of the new customers we’ve brought in are because we’re able to do variable data,” he said, but it’s been a big plus to existing customers, too. The Indigo allowed Royal Label to expand its services for one of the mainstays of its business, pharmaceutical and medical products companies, into consecutively numbered labeling, for instance. It also “opened up a lot of different markets,” Marychris noted, such as cottage industries like a local specialty candle manufacturer for whom Royal Label can change the scent on the label from vanilla to strawberry mid-run with the click of a mouse.

The firm can now do bar coding and non-adhesives as well. The Indigo is good for labels, decals, technical data sheets, ad sheets and more.

A variety of clients
Some of Royal Label’s more recent customers have included Green Mountain Coffee, for whom it did specialty insert labels with bar codes for the coffee company’s retail sales locations,
Bertucci’s, for whom it did the restaurant chain’s menu inserts, and BOSE, for whom Royal Label printed a custom Sunday newspaper ad sheet shaped like a BOSE radio. (Indeed, Royal Label has expanded its services enough it is considering adding a reference to its printing capabilities to the company name.)

Deciding to invest in the new Indigo digital press when they did was a risk for the company that paid off, and which combined with the realignment of some staff positions and several strategic hires, has proven a sound tactical move. There had been a drop-off in sales the prior two years, noted Paul Clifford, but this year “our sales are up 12 percent over last year.” The company’s fiscal year ends Sept. 30, he noted, and with some nine months of data, it is on a good track for profitability.

Marychris noted the company is now able to go to existing clients, introduce the new technology and get business they may have sent off elsewhere before. The Indigo, cost-effective for short runs, Ezepik said, has opened up the company’s other equipment for other new business and longer runs. Royal Label handles a variety of adhesives, material size and thicknesses on equipment ranging from the Indigo with Omega finisher, to a six-color Propheteer six-color press with UV capability, six Flexo presses, four Webtrons with three to seven-color capability, a two-color pin feed press, two silk-screen presses, a letterpress, a flatbed die-cutter, digital scales, a sheeter and three Arpeco trackers for quality control and finishing. They also have a hybrid Arpeco for blank labeling with die-cutting.

The company runs Program Solutions software and recently upgraded to computers running on Microsoft XP. Clients are able to communicate with and send files to Royal Label electronically, though one area where the company has been a little slow to move is in developing its online presence. Ezepik said the company owns its domain name, but hasn’t created a web site yet. That will become a priority this fall, she said, noting it is something Marychris has championed.

Plans to improve the workspace
The company is also slated to upgrade its Indigo to an HPWS4000 in September, which can run twice as fast as the old one, according to operations manager Paul Pelletier, and will surpass even the top-notch quality of the existing Indigo. It will be six-color, with a seventh for spot color. Pelletier said the new equipment has will also bring about a redesign of the company’s workspace to streamline workflow.

A new showcase room is being built for the Indigo, and other space is being reorganized to make the process more seamless. A separate, quieter area is being set aside for an art director and graphic artist, Pelletier said, plate-making is being moved to the center room, and a new “staging” area is being created. The stager will assemble all of the pieces needed for a given job and remove them at the end, freeing up the operators to print all day and not be looking for the next thing they need for the job. That move is designed to help cut the cost of doing business, he said, a necessity in today’s market with demanding customers. Companies are more often having to absorb vendor increases and look for savings elsewhere, he noted. “We’re trying to emphasize a lean manufacturing discipline.”

In addition to the new equipment, the company has taken on a new feel as the leadership has moved from an older generation with experience in an earlier era to a younger one with ambitions in this one. Though still appreciating the value of experience and tradition — many employees still have more than 20 years of experience — there is a dynamic company team in place, Ezepik said. “We all want to see this company succeed and go down that road we haven’t gone.”

There is “no slack” in the company, she said, but “morale is really up.” There are high expectations at Royal Label, a legacy of their father’s work ethic, and high hopes for it. Pelletier, who has been at Royal Label for 11 years, is a prime example. He is animated as he leads a tour of the plant and excited as he discusses the planned changes. “The Cliffords are fantastic to work with,” he said, adding “it’s a good atmosphere and it’s nice not to be just a number. At this place, you can really make a difference.”

Just as they have different, but complementary areas of expertise, the three Clifford siblings have very different, but complementary, styles. Paul is “the boss,” all final decisions run past him, but he sits on the company’s Board of Directors with his sisters, and major decisions affecting the company are a joint decision. They are very much involved in each other’s lives outside the office, but they have learned to “leave work at work,” Ezepik said.

“You do have to make a conscious decision to leave some of that stuff at the office,” said Paul Clifford, but he noted the positive aspect of working together as a family is that “you’re dealing with people who care about the business and the business flourishing.”

About the author: Pam Mieth is a freelance writer living in Cambridge, Mass.