Print
Solutions April 2006
Cover
Story
TOP
100 Manufacturers — Growth
Strategy
STATIONERY
PROGRAMS
Tailored
to Fit Customer Demands
Company:
C.E. Printed Products
Headquarters:
Carol Stream, Ill.
Founded:
1984
Principal:
Robert L. Ohr, President
Employees:
70
Business
in Brief:
Formerly known as Chicago Envelope,
the family-owned company began
manufacturing only envelopes in
the 1980s, but over the last 20
years has developed into a full-service
stationery program provider.
Sales
increase from FY 2004 to FY 2005:
4.9%
When
60 percent of profits come from
a few products, a company quickly
realizes its strengths and cultivates
them.
“We’ve
seen a large area of growth in
our stationery programs,”
says Adam McNeill, Director of
Marketing and Sales of C.E. Printed
Products. Hence, the company has
added 27 new stationery programs
to its product offerings within
the past year with the help of
inline production of business
cards, letterhead and envelopes.
C.E.
Printed Products began 22 years
ago strictly as an envelope manufacturer.
“But as we saw the growth
of the envelope business slow
down a little bit, we decided
to look at complimentary products,”
McNeill says. This shift was spurred
by advances in technology in which
the company heavily invested.
“We updated our internal
operations and capabilities and
instituted online ordering roughly
five years ago,” he says.
The company’s CEO
Online Stationery Ordering Program
has basic web-to-print capabilities,
allowing customers to input variable
information that can appear on
various products such as business
cards. McNeill says C.E. Printed
Products’online ordering
“has grown in popularity.
Distributors definitely see the
value of it.”
C.E.
Printed Products also has made
an effort to better understand
customers. “We’ve
re-evaluated our current customers
to see if we can better penetrate
some of our markets,” McNeill
says. “We take a look at
what our business is catering
to.” McNeill says the company
focused specifically on customers
who were seeking more business
in the web-to-print sector and
were interested in integrating
their technology with their manufacturers.
To better understand its customer
needs, the company began “asking
what we could do better and what
we could offer that we weren’t
currently offering,” he
says.
So
far, the company has seen sales
growth in some markets. With the
help of distributorships that
include the Maine Printing Company,
Portland, Maine; Webb/Mason, Hunt
Valley, Md., and FRI Resources,
St. Louis, C.E. Printed Products
now provides stationery programs
for a wide array of end users.
“We’ve definitely
grown our business among large
corporations, especially in the
entertainment, food service, and
hospital industries,” McNeill
says.
McNeill
says their manufacturing facility
has been able to integrate with
distributorships software programs
to create these stationery products
for end users. “Most of
our customers have their own ordering
programs and they are able to
transfer the information to us.”
McNeill says C.E. Printed Products’
ability to work seamlessly with
distributors is to the company’s
advantage. “It will help
us to take those business opportunities
and partner with our customers
to find a solution.” These
improvements in technology have
allowed C.E. Printed Products
to increase sales of some product
from 2,000 a month to 5,000 a
month with the same number of
employees.
—LaShell
Stratton
