PrintingNews.com

These days, the ability to grow and expand your company indeed calls for a celebration. K/P Corp., headquartered in San Ramon, Calif., recently held a grand opening for its newest location in Renton, Wash. More than 250 attendees gathered there to mark the beginning of "A New Marketing Space All in One Place."

But, like many companies, before getting to the point of being able to host an elaborate, colorful, and creative fashion show, K/P Corp. had to start somewhere.

West Coast-native K/P Corp., formerly Knapp Printing, was originally an Oregon-based family business owned by Jim Knapp in 1929. In the 1960s, the company expanded into direct mail. The 1980s brought fulfillment and distribution, and in the early 1990s, K/P Corp. became one of the first printers in the United States to embrace the HP Indigo protocol.

Over the years, the company grew through acquisition. In 2000, the company started using Web to print and creating tools companies are now using. In 2004, K/P Corp. acquired Raine Media, the "consulting arm" that focuses on marketing and analytics.

In 2008, K/P Corp. came in at $60 million in sales. The company recently ranked number 88 on Printing Impression's list of Top 400 Printing Companies in North America.

"We have six locations throughout California, Washington, Utah, and Oregon. Although we are West Coast focused, we do international distribution. The company has gone from family to employee owned, and we have about 400 employees," said Brett Olszewski, senior vice president, sales and marketing.

"We started off in the digital arena with Indigos. We also used iGens. Black and white transpromo is still a big emerging space," he informed. K/P currently uses HP, Oce, and Xerox digital printers.

During the past three years, K/P Corp. has invested in its infrastructure—databases, servers, and the fastest black and white printers for transpromo documents.

Olszewski stated that K/P has been on a path to transition for the past eight years as a digital marketing company. "If you look at technology and the way human interaction is going on, for example the social awareness of green, it's shifting ways. Print media is being augmented in cell phones. Digital creates endless communication opportunities," he continued.

"Digital print is making it easier to communicate with our customers. Clients are now responding to marketing messages in many ways. Inbound response is a growth area. We've actually created document component systems, pURLS, and ways to be relevant in both inbound and outbound at the same time."

Both offset and digital printing have values. The values of offset are scale and consistency, while every sheet that comes off a digital printer can be different or variable. Printers need to make the most of their equipment.

"We use digital printing to augment offset, but that's just a baby step. The real value is personalization. Look at digital content—how it is stored, how you access it, then put customers' requests into templates and create a workflow of template creation to on demand, digital print. XMPie software takes advantage of digital workflow," said Olszewski.

Other applications include database integration, multi-channel marketing, Web to print using interlinkONE and similar programs, and ancillary services such as mailing.