February 16, 2004
Graphic nature | Spectrum Printing moves to Portland to be closer to its customers — and to the customers it's trying to get
By Alan Elliott
When seven tractor-trailers loaded with electronic presses, binding equipment and a host of other graphics-related gear backed-up to a Riverside Drive loading dock in December, Portland became the fourth city to open its arms to Spectrum Printing & Graphics.
The business has hopped from Saco to Lewiston to Auburn since it was founded by co-owners Alex McCulloch and Mike Fournier in 1986. Each move marked an expansion and improving revenues, with sales edging above $3 million in the past several years.
They were also years in which the print and graphics industry suffered steep declines nationwide. Online publishing had seized a piece of the traditional market, forcing print shops everywhere ˆ including the 186 operations in Maine ˆ to hustle for their share of the remaining pie.
But McCulloch and Fournier were already charting their next move, pursuing what they saw as an unaddressed niche in Maine's print shop landscape: the need for mid-quantity, high-quality catalog press runs. Their strategy called for a new, state-of-the-art, $2.2 million press to fill the gap, and a jump from Auburn to Portland to put them nearer the bulk of their clients.
The pair spent months choreographing a move that would minimize disrupted production. They spent more than $300,000 to prepare the new building for presswork, including extensive rewiring and a 60-foot mechanic's pit, carved through a concrete floor, which would allow access to the underside of the press. They supplemented their financing with help from the city's economic development division, securing a $200,000 loan from the Downtown Portland Corp.
By the start of the new year, Spectrum's presses sat firmly on Portland soil, and McCulloch and his sales crew turned to wooing a list of catalog merchandisers he says were previously compelled to deal with out-of-state printers, because no one in Maine had a press that could do the work. McCulloch hopes the new press can help him capture some of that business, which he hopes will help Spectrum to boost its recent growth rate, which has hovered at about 1% a year.
"Our biggest growth spurt was when we went from a two-color press to a six-color press [in 1995] when we first moved into Auburn," said McCulloch, 54. "We had probably 80% growth that following year. We think we're going to do about the same thing with this one."
Spectrum's existing clients include high-profile names like L.L. Bean, National Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor and Idexx, for whom the company produces brochures, annual reports and other marketing materials. The firm also caters to a broad array of advertising and marketing agencies in Portland. But try to finagle names of the mid-sized catalog retailers McCulloch aims to pursue ˆ the genre includes Garnet Hill, Sundance and other high-quality catalogs ˆ and he hems, haws and bites his tongue rather than divulge bits of his sales crew's call list.
Suffice to say, he believes the list will generate a large share of any upcoming sales surge. "There are a lot of [retailers] here in the state doing those kinds of catalogs," McCulloch said. "Anybody wanting this done sheet-wise right now, that kind of catalog work, they have to go out of state to Boston, or places further south."
Press run
Fournier, a Lewiston resident, and McCulloch, who lives in Minot, opened their first shop in Saco, with two presses printing stationery and brochures, one- and two-color projects for colleges, businesses around Portland and ad agencies.
McCulloch had fallen in love with his trade as a teenager. Born in Hamilton, Scotland, McCulloch and his family immigrated to Long Island, N.Y. when he was 12. He learned to run a press as a high school kid, printing stationery and envelopes in a New York print shop. The Navy brought him to Maine, where he was a flight mechanic working on Orion P3s at Brunswick Naval Air Station. McCulloch and Fournier met through their wives, who worked together at Marcotte Chevrolet (now Emerson Chevrolet) in Auburn. McCulloch later become an image assembler at Penmor Lithography in Lewiston, where Fournier was a pressman.
The Penmor crew were seasoned trade folk. Penmor employees, particularly managers, often hold positions for decades, limiting opportunities for advancement, which is why McCulloch and Fournier designed their own advancement plan. They found a third partner, rustled up $80,000 in financing and set out to launch their own printing company in Saco, even though it was a 50-minute commute from their homes. "At the time we thought it was a good idea," McCulloch said. "The Lewiston-Auburn area is saturated with small printers and we thought the Saco area might be a better fit."
Spectrum's early years were spent turning out small jobs for clients like Bowdoin College, Bates College and Mahar Graphics in Bath. Their first relocation came in 1990, when McCulloch and Fournier bought out their third partner and spent $180,000 to jump up to a two-color, 29-inch press. The new, 10-foot long monster demanded they find more space. The mostly Lewiston-Auburn-based crew was weary of the long drive to Saco, McCulloch said, so they moved back closer to home and leased a shop on Lewiston's River Road.
The business grew to seven employees and stepped up to higher-grade projects, doing four-color work by passing sheets twice through the new press. Sales jumped, hitting $800,000 the following year. By 1995 Spectrum was an 11-employee, $1.4 million operation, and the partners were hungry for another leap. They decided on a $1 million upgrade ˆ to a six-color, 28-inch press with in-line aqueous coating capability. In addition to the larger size and more colors, the new unit automatically coated sheets in a variety of finishes, saving time previously spent varnishing the finished product.
They leased a new building on First Flight Drive in Auburn large enough to house the new 40-foot press, as well as Spectrum's existing equipment. McCulloch said sales jumped to more than $1.5 million while the crew grew to 30 employees.
The catalyst for Spectrum's latest move, and the tool McCulloch hopes will reroute catalog business back to Maine, is a slab of electronics-driven printing gear six feet wide, nine feet high and as long as a tractor-trailer. In printer's parlance, it's an eight-color Mitsubishi perfecting press with in-line aqueous coating, able to churn out 34,000 sheets an hour, clean itself, and even rinse and hang its own print plates. The press handles 40-inch sheets of paper, the largest standard size in the industry.
Despite the impressive specs, it's neither the largest nor the fastest press in Maine. Spencer Press in Wells and Dingley Press in Lisbon operate more traditional web presses, which unspool continuous rolls of paper through massive, high-speed mechanical mazes. They are extremely fast, able to cost effectively spin through runs into the millions of copies.
But Spectrum isn't looking to compete on quantity ˆ it's after quality. Smaller print shops run sheet-fed presses and serve ad agencies, colleges, corporate clients and others who require smaller runs and often demand higher grade paper and finishes. Spectrum's move into the 40-inch, or full-size, arena puts it in direct competition with just three other Maine print shops. The largest is JS McCarthy in Augusta, which runs four 40-inch presses seven days a week, along with Franklin Printing in Farmington and Penmor Lithographers Inc. in Lewiston.
Customers who do a lot of printing tend to spread the work around, sending some jobs out to bid, placing others with printers whom they know to have a particular strength. Idexx Corp., for example, generally turns to Penmor for its direct mail printings, which often run more than 100,000 pieces, according to Nick DiBiase, Idexx's print buyer and planner. For its higher-quality jobs, though, which go to Spectrum as well as other printers, Idexx places orders in the 2,500-30,000 range, many of them perfected, meaning they're printed on both sides if the sheet. It also means the work generally needs to be proofed and signed off on by the customer during different stages of production, which involves printing company reps driving the proofs to DiBiase's office in Westbrook.
That's where Spectrum's move to Portland helps differentiate the company, DiBiase said. "There wasn't really a strong, four-color, high-quality printer in Portland," he said. "I wasn't traveling that much but [Spectrum's press reps] were, and for some reason an hour makes a difference to us." Even so, DiBiase wouldn't say if Idexx would consider sending more of its high-quality work to Spectrum, though he did say "they'll be competitive on larger jobs, that's for sure."
The size and perfecting capability of Spectrum's new press also increase production speed. A four-color press requires two passes in order to ink both sides of a sheet. The Spectrum press flips sheets midway through the run, printing four colors on either side, automating an additional step in the process.
Sheet size is another labor-saving factor. Each sheet of 40-inch press stock ˆ Spectrum buys the bulk of its paper from Lindenmeyer Munroe Paper Co., which is now a stone's throw away on Riverside Drive ˆ produces sixteen 8.5 x 11 pages. Four sheets equal a 64-page catalog. A 28-inch press, Spectrum's previous top-of-the-line capability, delivered only half that number per pass. "Then you've got twice the press time, twice the binding time, you're handling everything twice as much, and as a result it's going to be very hard to be competitive on that kind of job," said Michael Mahar, owner and creative director of Mahar Graphics in Bath.
McCulloch's biggest concern in the move was his employees: How many would opt to stay with the company in the face of the new commute? The answer was all of them, some of whom are now carpooling. Spectrum has also hired four new employees since the move, raising the payroll to 34 people. If it can land some of the catalog business it's after, McCulloch anticipates the company's workforce could double over the next 12-18 months.
McCulloch says the Portland move likely will be the last for Spectrum. He's also contemplating a permanent move to Portland, which would minimize his commute and, equally important, shave the distance to and from his boat, which he docks in South Portland. Even now, the drive doesn't seem so bad, especially when he considers the drive down to Saco back in Spectrum's early days. "It doesn't take long at all ˆ it's a 20-minute drive from the Auburn exit to exit 10," he said. "Well, I better say 25 or I'll have the cops calling me."
The business has hopped from Saco to Lewiston to Auburn since it was founded by co-owners Alex McCulloch and Mike Fournier in 1986. Each move marked an expansion and improving revenues, with sales edging above $3 million in the past several years.
They were also years in which the print and graphics industry suffered steep declines nationwide. Online publishing had seized a piece of the traditional market, forcing print shops everywhere ˆ including the 186 operations in Maine ˆ to hustle for their share of the remaining pie.
But McCulloch and Fournier were already charting their next move, pursuing what they saw as an unaddressed niche in Maine's print shop landscape: the need for mid-quantity, high-quality catalog press runs. Their strategy called for a new, state-of-the-art, $2.2 million press to fill the gap, and a jump from Auburn to Portland to put them nearer the bulk of their clients.
The pair spent months choreographing a move that would minimize disrupted production. They spent more than $300,000 to prepare the new building for presswork, including extensive rewiring and a 60-foot mechanic's pit, carved through a concrete floor, which would allow access to the underside of the press. They supplemented their financing with help from the city's economic development division, securing a $200,000 loan from the Downtown Portland Corp.
By the start of the new year, Spectrum's presses sat firmly on Portland soil, and McCulloch and his sales crew turned to wooing a list of catalog merchandisers he says were previously compelled to deal with out-of-state printers, because no one in Maine had a press that could do the work. McCulloch hopes the new press can help him capture some of that business, which he hopes will help Spectrum to boost its recent growth rate, which has hovered at about 1% a year.
"Our biggest growth spurt was when we went from a two-color press to a six-color press [in 1995] when we first moved into Auburn," said McCulloch, 54. "We had probably 80% growth that following year. We think we're going to do about the same thing with this one."
Spectrum's existing clients include high-profile names like L.L. Bean, National Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor and Idexx, for whom the company produces brochures, annual reports and other marketing materials. The firm also caters to a broad array of advertising and marketing agencies in Portland. But try to finagle names of the mid-sized catalog retailers McCulloch aims to pursue ˆ the genre includes Garnet Hill, Sundance and other high-quality catalogs ˆ and he hems, haws and bites his tongue rather than divulge bits of his sales crew's call list.
Suffice to say, he believes the list will generate a large share of any upcoming sales surge. "There are a lot of [retailers] here in the state doing those kinds of catalogs," McCulloch said. "Anybody wanting this done sheet-wise right now, that kind of catalog work, they have to go out of state to Boston, or places further south."
Press run
Fournier, a Lewiston resident, and McCulloch, who lives in Minot, opened their first shop in Saco, with two presses printing stationery and brochures, one- and two-color projects for colleges, businesses around Portland and ad agencies.
McCulloch had fallen in love with his trade as a teenager. Born in Hamilton, Scotland, McCulloch and his family immigrated to Long Island, N.Y. when he was 12. He learned to run a press as a high school kid, printing stationery and envelopes in a New York print shop. The Navy brought him to Maine, where he was a flight mechanic working on Orion P3s at Brunswick Naval Air Station. McCulloch and Fournier met through their wives, who worked together at Marcotte Chevrolet (now Emerson Chevrolet) in Auburn. McCulloch later become an image assembler at Penmor Lithography in Lewiston, where Fournier was a pressman.
The Penmor crew were seasoned trade folk. Penmor employees, particularly managers, often hold positions for decades, limiting opportunities for advancement, which is why McCulloch and Fournier designed their own advancement plan. They found a third partner, rustled up $80,000 in financing and set out to launch their own printing company in Saco, even though it was a 50-minute commute from their homes. "At the time we thought it was a good idea," McCulloch said. "The Lewiston-Auburn area is saturated with small printers and we thought the Saco area might be a better fit."
Spectrum's early years were spent turning out small jobs for clients like Bowdoin College, Bates College and Mahar Graphics in Bath. Their first relocation came in 1990, when McCulloch and Fournier bought out their third partner and spent $180,000 to jump up to a two-color, 29-inch press. The new, 10-foot long monster demanded they find more space. The mostly Lewiston-Auburn-based crew was weary of the long drive to Saco, McCulloch said, so they moved back closer to home and leased a shop on Lewiston's River Road.
The business grew to seven employees and stepped up to higher-grade projects, doing four-color work by passing sheets twice through the new press. Sales jumped, hitting $800,000 the following year. By 1995 Spectrum was an 11-employee, $1.4 million operation, and the partners were hungry for another leap. They decided on a $1 million upgrade ˆ to a six-color, 28-inch press with in-line aqueous coating capability. In addition to the larger size and more colors, the new unit automatically coated sheets in a variety of finishes, saving time previously spent varnishing the finished product.
They leased a new building on First Flight Drive in Auburn large enough to house the new 40-foot press, as well as Spectrum's existing equipment. McCulloch said sales jumped to more than $1.5 million while the crew grew to 30 employees.
The catalyst for Spectrum's latest move, and the tool McCulloch hopes will reroute catalog business back to Maine, is a slab of electronics-driven printing gear six feet wide, nine feet high and as long as a tractor-trailer. In printer's parlance, it's an eight-color Mitsubishi perfecting press with in-line aqueous coating, able to churn out 34,000 sheets an hour, clean itself, and even rinse and hang its own print plates. The press handles 40-inch sheets of paper, the largest standard size in the industry.
Despite the impressive specs, it's neither the largest nor the fastest press in Maine. Spencer Press in Wells and Dingley Press in Lisbon operate more traditional web presses, which unspool continuous rolls of paper through massive, high-speed mechanical mazes. They are extremely fast, able to cost effectively spin through runs into the millions of copies.
But Spectrum isn't looking to compete on quantity ˆ it's after quality. Smaller print shops run sheet-fed presses and serve ad agencies, colleges, corporate clients and others who require smaller runs and often demand higher grade paper and finishes. Spectrum's move into the 40-inch, or full-size, arena puts it in direct competition with just three other Maine print shops. The largest is JS McCarthy in Augusta, which runs four 40-inch presses seven days a week, along with Franklin Printing in Farmington and Penmor Lithographers Inc. in Lewiston.
Customers who do a lot of printing tend to spread the work around, sending some jobs out to bid, placing others with printers whom they know to have a particular strength. Idexx Corp., for example, generally turns to Penmor for its direct mail printings, which often run more than 100,000 pieces, according to Nick DiBiase, Idexx's print buyer and planner. For its higher-quality jobs, though, which go to Spectrum as well as other printers, Idexx places orders in the 2,500-30,000 range, many of them perfected, meaning they're printed on both sides if the sheet. It also means the work generally needs to be proofed and signed off on by the customer during different stages of production, which involves printing company reps driving the proofs to DiBiase's office in Westbrook.
That's where Spectrum's move to Portland helps differentiate the company, DiBiase said. "There wasn't really a strong, four-color, high-quality printer in Portland," he said. "I wasn't traveling that much but [Spectrum's press reps] were, and for some reason an hour makes a difference to us." Even so, DiBiase wouldn't say if Idexx would consider sending more of its high-quality work to Spectrum, though he did say "they'll be competitive on larger jobs, that's for sure."
The size and perfecting capability of Spectrum's new press also increase production speed. A four-color press requires two passes in order to ink both sides of a sheet. The Spectrum press flips sheets midway through the run, printing four colors on either side, automating an additional step in the process.
Sheet size is another labor-saving factor. Each sheet of 40-inch press stock ˆ Spectrum buys the bulk of its paper from Lindenmeyer Munroe Paper Co., which is now a stone's throw away on Riverside Drive ˆ produces sixteen 8.5 x 11 pages. Four sheets equal a 64-page catalog. A 28-inch press, Spectrum's previous top-of-the-line capability, delivered only half that number per pass. "Then you've got twice the press time, twice the binding time, you're handling everything twice as much, and as a result it's going to be very hard to be competitive on that kind of job," said Michael Mahar, owner and creative director of Mahar Graphics in Bath.
McCulloch's biggest concern in the move was his employees: How many would opt to stay with the company in the face of the new commute? The answer was all of them, some of whom are now carpooling. Spectrum has also hired four new employees since the move, raising the payroll to 34 people. If it can land some of the catalog business it's after, McCulloch anticipates the company's workforce could double over the next 12-18 months.
McCulloch says the Portland move likely will be the last for Spectrum. He's also contemplating a permanent move to Portland, which would minimize his commute and, equally important, shave the distance to and from his boat, which he docks in South Portland. Even now, the drive doesn't seem so bad, especially when he considers the drive down to Saco back in Spectrum's early days. "It doesn't take long at all ˆ it's a 20-minute drive from the Auburn exit to exit 10," he said. "Well, I better say 25 or I'll have the cops calling me."
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