The East Coast’s oldest continually operating printing company – also probably the oldest in the U.S. – reflects the old saying, “A rolling stone gathers no moss, but it gains a certain polish.” Gazette Printing is under family ownership, and its current owners, Mark and Paula Goodwin, have been busy making sure their business has that polish. “At the time we purchased the company in 2006,” Mark Goodwin says, “we were running a lot of older equipment, so we have been updating our prepress and production operations.”
One area that still needed attention was the bindery. Goodwin points out that experienced bindery employees are hard to come by, and there is a very competitive market for their services. “Good bindery people know they can jump ship and go to another company for more money,” he says. “If you only have one or two bindery workers and one or both leave, it puts you in a bind, so to speak, especially if you are a one-shift 40″ operation like we are.”
Gazette had been running traditional manual buckle folders with a 20-year bindery veteran. “We had redundancy in the press room,” Goodwin says, “but not in the bindery. If you can’t get the work out the door because of bindery bottlenecks, you have a real problem. And people want a three-day lead time, so there is not much room for error.”