Blooming Color has evolved many times over its 35-year history, from its start as a Minuteman Press franchise in 1988 to growing their offset capabilities with the acquisition of Blooming Color in 2006, followed by its subsequent rebranding. The business’s most recent transformation into a fully digital e-commerce printer began in 2009 when current CEO Brian Scott was acting as the Vice President, Digital Technologies. “That’s when I began searching for a new digital press to replace our lower-end copier equipment” says Scott, who originally joined the Illinois-based company when it was Minuteman Press in 1998 while he was still in college. The company acquired its first HP Indigo press in January 2010 and continued to purchase additional presses over the ensuing years, but that was only the beginning.
“As the company was growing organically in the 1990s and early 2000s,” explains Blooming Color President Rosemarie Breske Garvey, “its business was transactional. As the e-commerce era started to take off in 2015-ish, that’s when we hopped into that and became more program oriented. We had a client that started doing micro-orders with us; we would get maybe 10 or 20 of these small orders per day, and it was almost an afterthought for us, but that was our first real step into batching like jobs together and taking a look at the prepress automation side of it.
“Now fast forward about five years to the pandemic, and that’s when e-commerce really popped. That December was when we had our first true peak season where, all of a sudden, we were shipping posters and frames, greeting cards, calendars –all of that volume came out of nowhere. And we very quickly learned what it meant to have a peak season and to be an e-commerce printer. Over the last four years, that’s where our focus has remained, where our opportunities have come from, and where our team has honed their skills.”
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