Unigraphic: A former prepress service bureau diversifies into a total solutions provider
By Nancy Hitchcock
Just as a realtor might say that the keys to buying property are location, location, location, a printer, such as Unigraphic, might say that the keys to running a growing graphics company are diversify, diversify, diversify.

Unigraphic — a $17 million company that has been growing at a 30 percent rate for the last three years — has learned this lesson the hard way.

For four decades the company has provided its clients, such as ad agencies, with high-end prepress services. In 2000, Bob Quinlan, who started at Unigraphic in 1982 while he was in college, bought the company with high hopes of growing the company by diversifying into new areas. However, soon after the purchase, 9/11 sent the economy to a standstill and its largest client base — ad agencies — cut back on their budgets. As a result, Unigraphic dwindled from 120 to about 60 employees in six to eight months.

Ever since then, the company has aggressively pursued a range of diversified services that enable it to offer customers more than just prepress. Now, Unigraphic has evolved into a total solutions provider, printing everything from business cards to variable data postcards to billboards and building wraps. “We’re now back up to 150 employees and sales have just gone over what we did in 2001,” says Shawn Pothier, sales and marketing manager. “It’s a different mix of sales, which is good, and will protect us from the same type of situation.”

The company operates prepress, digital printing, commercial printing, and large- and grand-format printing in its 70,000-square-foot facility in Woburn, Mass. Having specialized in color work for so many years, the prepress department still makes up 35 percent of the business. Now, when clients such as high-end advertising agencies including Modernista and Arnold Worldwide, obtain scanning, digital proofing, and color correction work, they can also review their printing needs and keep their business in one location. In addition, the department offers digital asset management. With Xinet’s Web Native system, the company houses clients’ images and other files. “We give customers the ability to access all of their high-res and low-res images 24/7,” says Mark Cassidy, IT manager.

Fast and large
One of Unigraphic’s fastest growing departments is the large- and grand-format area.

Projects include a 250-foot building wrap in Times Square revealing New Balance’s new Zip technology for its sneakers, and a large campaign for Honey Dew Donuts comprising 160 28 by 44-inch window posters, 160 14 by 11-inch splash guard signs, 160 22 by 8-inch menu board signs, and more.

For one of its biggest customers, Arnold Worldwide, the company prints all of the billboards for Citizens Bank, which amounts to a few hundred boards a year. “We were doing all of the color work/retouching for the store front signage for Citizens Bank and then sending the files to another printer,” explains Executive Vice President Jack Quinlan. “Now we have picked up all of their billboard printing.”

Another ad agency, Modernista, recently requested a 20 by 10-foot backlit banner for Cadillac for the Javitz Center in New York City. “We do all the retouching and color work for Cadillac’s images for ad campaigns,” says Jack Quinlan. “We just finished their first billboard campaign, which includes 15 vinyl boards for eight different cities. The creatives like to keep the printing in one place to keep the color consistency and to be able to come here and do press okays.”

One of the largest wide & grand format project Unigraphic has printed is a campaign it’s been working on for the last month for Sovereign Bank. The campaign includes 30 billboards, a 12 by 325-foot sidewalk wrap for 5th Avenue in New York City, 90 two sheeters, 90 three sheeters, 75 urban panels, 40 bus shelters, 396 phone kiosks, and 1,800 subway cards, to name some of the campaign’s components. “The customer has been thrilled that we work 24/7 and can meet the deadlines they’ve given us,” says Account Manager Jeff Carlson.

For grand-format printing, a Scitex Grand Jet and a Vutek 5330 print to 16.4-feet wide and enable the company to output up to 40 billboards a day. And for producing wide-format jobs such as POPs and signs, a Hewlett-Packard HP9000 prints six colors to 60 inches wide and a HP5500 prints to 60 inches wide.

Acquisitions and installations
The commercial print department has been charged with new growth through acquisitions and state-of-the-art technology. Unigraphic nearly doubled its commercial print business last November when it acquired Synergy Graphics, a small local commercial printer. Customers can now request on-demand short-run printing on the Indigo six-color variable data press and the Kodak DI. The department also just added to its press list of two 28 by 40-inch Komori presses and 28-inch Komori press, a KBA Rapida 105 41-inch seven-color sheetfed press to be able to offer customers the highest quality printing. The KBA 105 press prints to 18,000 sheets an hour.

“Because we wanted to cross sell to agencies,” says Jack Quinlan, “we needed to upgrade our commercial print capabilities to get involved in some of those beautiful Cadillac pieces, for example. We had six-color presses, but now we’re at a much higher quality level with this new machine. For our high-level agency work, the clients know that we can do color, and now we have a machine that can produce it. We’re experts in color and we can now print high-end pieces and print many different applications, such as POPs and menus, on synthetic.”

In addition to helping keep up with capacity, the Rapida 105 will add the capability of printing with hybrid finishes and UV varnishes. Furthermore, with the ability to print on substrates up to 48 pt. board stock, the Rapida 105 will enable Unigraphic to enter the packaging market.

Unigraphic’s digital printing department is also installing new technology: a KBA 74 Karat digital offset press will add the ability to produce a larger sheet size (20 by 28-inches) for high-quality short runs. Customers will be able to order short run pocket folders with aqueous coating, for example.

On its six-color HP Indigo 3000 12 by 18-inch digital press, customers print static and variable data jobs. For a client in the educational market, for example, it will print 3,000 to 5,000 postcards a month — each postcard will have about nine variable fields.

A web-to-print system allows customers to order jobs such as business cards and letterhead right from their computer. “We’ve been working on web-to-print for two years, and we’re just starting to pick up speed with it now,” enthuses Cassidy. “We have more and more customers asking for the tools to be able to do this right from their desktop. It makes the customers’ life so much easier. When your average customer wants to order business cards they have to call the customer service rep, email the file, make a proof then order the print. Now, customers go to their web portals, type in the cards themselves, get a proof on their screens, and the files will go right to our presses without anyone touching the files.”

One-stop shopping
With Unigraphic now offering a wide variety of services, the company is exactly how Bob Quinlan envisioned it to be. “When I bought the company I was a sales manager and I saw the opportunity to provide all the services under one roof,” says the president. “It was like when Home Depot came in and took over all the little hardware stores and paint stores. I don’t go to any of those stores anymore. I go to Home Depot or Lowe’s. And I thought the same thing was going to be applicable to graphics services. When customers send their files and we provide color and retouching, we can print the file out to many different devices.”

One campaign that took advantage of all of the company’s capabilities was for Fruit2O. “We did all the image work through prepress and retouching for the ads that went into publication, then we printed the coupons that went to stores, and printed all the out-of home pieces, which are the billboards and bus sides,” the company president said. “If we were to only handle the prepress side of the job a few years ago, we probably would have handled only about $10,000 in business. It ended up being about a $200,000 campaign.”

Timberland is another good example of a customer that is in every department weekly, says Bob Quinlan. As a testament to its quality printing, Unigraphic just received several awards for the printing of Timberland’s catalogs at the 2006 Gallery of Superb Printing from the Boston Litho/Craftsmen’s Club.

To fulfill the goal of operating under one roof, the company has been on the move — literally and figuratively — for years. In 2002, it moved to consolidate three sites in Pembroke, Saugus, and Malden into Woburn’s 50,000-square-foot facility. It was just a few months ago that it leased the 20,000 sq-foot space next door to house the large- and grand-format equipment. Strategically, it subleased the space to Pearl Bindery to provide finishing capabilities. Several weeks ago the company installed an 80-foot Miller Welder for banner and signage welding in that space as well.

The company bases its decisions on meeting and exceeding customers’ expectations. Being a member of organizations, such as Printing Industries of New England, is advantageous because it offers employee training, cross-training seminars, general industry information, reference data, and exposure to other companies in the industry, says the management team. With the growth of the company, the management team has expanded to now add Chuck Duggan, general manager, and Shawn Pothier, sales and marketing manager, to the executive team of brothers Bob Quinlan, Jack Quinlan, and Mike Quinlan, chief financial officer.

Continuous enhancements are part of the culture. “We’re still not at a point where I’d like to be for my total vision of the company,” Bob Quinlan said. “The next shift will be mail and fulfillment. Then we’ll look into the marketing side of things. It’s a completely different company than when I bought it. So we’re a dynamic organization with a vision that we’re going to provide a number of graphics services to our clients — not just one thing. Our philosophy is to always reinvent the company.”

About the author: Nancy A. Hitchcock writes about the printing and graphic communications industry. She served for many years as a senior editor at Electronic Publishing magazine. She can be reached at .