Blooming Color has evolved 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 family-run business’s most recent transformation into a fully digital ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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.”
While the company had made significant progress on the front end with a digital production portfolio of 5 Indigo presses, it was the back end – primarily the bindery – that was the bottleneck. Blooming Color had previously worked with Standard Finishing to acquire a Horizon SPF-200L Bookletmaker, and they turned to Standard again to bring their bindery up to speed. Between 2018 and 2024, Blooming Color acquired eight pieces of bindery equipment from Standard Finishing which included capabilities for cutting/stacking, perfect binding, trimming, die cutting, and saddlestitching.
One early finishing acquisition was the Horizon Smartstacker. “I had seen the SmartStacker once or twice on visits to Standard Finishing’s showroom,” Brain explains, “and this time I went there to specifically look at it. We installed it at the beginning of November 2021 and cut several million Christmas cards during that peak season. And that was without taking advantage of barcode automation, which we are now in the process of implementing. Plus, we’re looking at using it for book blocks, taking that workload off the guillotines as well.”
“We would not have made it through that peak season without it,” Rosemarie states. “It was phenomenal, and the team from Standard Horizon has been really good to us with exceptional support.”
Another acquisition, a Horizon RD-4055 Rotary Die Cutter, is primarily used for finishing business cards. “We did 35 million business cards on that machine last year,” Brian shares.
“It keeps those sheets off our guillotine cutters, allowing our skilled professionals to use those guillotines for what they are supposed to be used for, and the process is much more efficient now,” Rosemarie adds.
The company also beefed up its book binding capabilities over the years, bringing perfect binding in-house to serve an on-demand book publishing client as well as the growing yearbook market. They started modestly with a Horizon BQ-160 Perfect Binder but quickly outgrew it, adding a BQ-280 Perfect Binder. More recently, as production volumes continued to grow, they added the BQ-500 Perfect Binder. “Between the BQ-280 and the BQ-500, we crank out about 3,000 books per day. The BQ-500 allows us to easily process books of different sizes and thickness, up to 50 or 60 different jobs on a busy day. Books are now our fastest growing product, soft cover, hard cover, and saddlestitch,” Brian says. Saddlestitched books are produced on the Horizon StitchLiner Mark IV Saddlestitcher, which was acquired just last year and also handles variable page count.
“The interface is pretty much the same across the Horizon line, and a good operator can learn a new piece of equipment in as little as 20 minutes.”
Rosemarie Breske Garvey
President, Blooming Color
Blooming Color completed the transformation by connecting all their Standard Horizon equipment with Horizon iCE LiNK, a subscription-based bindery control system that allows for production management across multiple finishing devices to provide a higher level of operational efficiency.
A huge advantage of the Horizon equipment for Blooming Color is the ability to cross-train employees on the equipment. “One of our bindery operators, for example, runs both perfect binders and the StitchLiner. This is possible because the interface is pretty much the same across the Horizon line, and a good operator can learn a new piece of equipment in as little as 20 minutes.”
Rosemarie concludes, “As we’ve grown, we’ve been very fortunate to have Standard Horizon, and our local dealer Graphco, as true partners and not just people we buy equipment from. They go above and beyond whenever necessary. As one example, when we needed all the Horizon manuals in Spanish to better train our employees, they were able to make this happen. And they continue to work with us as we re-arrange our facility for greater efficiency.” Brian and Rosemarie agree that the Horizon equipment has been a game-changer at Blooming Color, converting stressful peak seasons to efficient, seamless production tuned to today’s on-demand environment.
