Back Row from left: Kirk Moulton, Gabe Mansara, Jasmine Oliver. Front Row from left: Reggie Curtis, Joslyn Jenning (Production Manager), Hiram O. Russell (Founder). Not Shown: Nate Kane (Driver)
By Ed Avis
COVID was devastating to countless businesses around the world, and Blue Boy Document Imaging in Washington DC was no exception. But for this APDSP member, the pandemic also has presented an opportunity: They hired some staff with new skills and have entered some new markets.
“Our core market is the AEC community and we were fortunate in that respect during COVID, because construction never stopped in Washington,” says Hiram Russell, the company’s founder. “At the same time, I could see that things were changing, the market was changing. I was retraining my staff to do more than one thing even before COVID, but during COVID we ran a help-wanted ad and a lot of people responded. We saw some good resumes and realized we could embellish our existing talent.”
Among the new staff Russell hired during COVID were two designers who could help build the firm’s graphics business.
“AEC is still 75 percent of our business, but 25 percent is other areas like restaurants, schools, the DC government. They need color posters, flyers, booklets, manuals, things like that,” Russell explains. “We saw what that market had for us and that changed who we needed on our team. It’s good, we have a lot of enthusiasm with the team now, a lot of energy.”
Rooted in Architecture
Russell entered the reprographics field through architecture. He graduated with a degree in architecture and interior design from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1982 and worked for a while for an architecture firm in that city. One of his jobs at that time was running the company’s blueprint machine.
In the mid 1980s he realized there was more architecture work in Washington DC, so he relocated there. He worked for architecture firms during the day, and at night he started doing some side work for his own clients. He grew his evening/weekend client base until his wife encouraged him to start his own firm and lease office space. In 1988 he launched HOR Design in a space on 14th Street NW in Washington.
Then he made a decision that eventually changed his career direction: He invested $1,000 in a tabletop blueprint machine.
“I told some people in the architectural community that I was going to get a blueprint machine, and some of them said, ‘If you get a machine, you can do our printing,’” Russell remembers. He started taking on blueprinting jobs while also growing his architecture business. The printing work started taking more and more of his time and energy.
“I realized I couldn’t do both architecture and blueprinting, something was going to suffer. I was at a crossroads,” he says. He looked at the competitive landscape in the DC area and realized there were far fewer blueprinting firms than architecture firms. “In my naiveté, I thought blueprinting was the way to go because there were tons of architects but only four or five repro shops.”
In 1989 Blue Boy Blueprinting was born. Russell says he chose the name because it was catchy and reminded him of a blues song.
He soon learned that the fact that there were only a handful of blueprinters in Washington did not mean it would be an easy going for Blue Boy. “The competition was cutthroat,” he says. “The main competition was Rowley-Scher and ABC, and I was three blocks from them.”
Russell joined a trade group that helped small businesses get government contracts, and soon learned Blue Boy was a finalist for the printing work for a major federal building. In order to make his two-person company seem bigger, Russell asked two of his friends to come to the office on the day the architectural firm principles came to visit. Blue Boy got the contract.
At first they used their tabletop printer to print the documents for that job, which required round-the-clock effort. Finally, about a year into the contract Russell stepped up his game by buying a used Dietzgen diazo printer.
“That job really got us on the map,” he remembers. “I liked those high-profile jobs. Later we did the FEDEX Field and the Nationals Stadium, Washington Convention Center and Homeland Security Headquarters. Those jobs got our name out there.”
Going Digital
Like the rest of the reprographics world, Blue Boy’s days as a diazo printer slowly petered out during the early 1990s. Russell bought an Océ 9400 in 1994 and followed that a few years later with an Océ 9800. By 1997 his business was completely digital. To better reflect the range of the company’s work, the name was changed to Blue Boy Document Imaging in 1998.
“Technology changed the whole game,” he says. “Once the digital equipment came, we had to embrace it because it allowed us to do more of what the customer was asking for. For example, they wanted to reduce full-size prints to half size, and now we could do that.”
Around the same time as Blue Boy went digital with their AEC printing, they invested in an HP DesignJet color inkjet. The color work they did at first was for their existing AEC customers – such as presentation boards and occasional color CAD printing – but a decade later they started tapping other markets for color work.
Today the company runs 60-inch and 52-inch HP DesignJets and two HP PageWide printers. Their customer base for color includes restaurants, schools, associations, the healthcare industry and the DC government. In addition, they print wholesale jobs for four other print shops that don’t have wide-format capabilities.
The new design staff Russell added during COVID allows the company to help clients create documents when they don’t have their own design staff and allows them to take sub-standard graphics files and correct them in-house.
“Color is definitely a major part of what we do now,” he says.
An Essential Business
When COVID first hit, reprographics firms in Washington DC were not clearly placed on the “essential business” list, so Russell sent his staff home. But then jobs started to flow in from the mayor’s office.
“We were doing so much work for the mayor because she was always in the news updating the area on the Covid pandemic and needed posters and flyers printed,” he says. “They also had us print thousands of 5x7 postcards to hand out. But I was doing all the work myself, because my staff was still at home and I wasn’t sure if they should come in. So finally I called the mayor’s office and said, ‘I appreciate this work, but am I an essential business?’ They said, ‘Of course you’re essential! You’re doing work for the mayor!’”
With the “essential business” question answered, Russell started having some employees come back to work starting with his production manager. Before long work started coming from their regular AEC clients, though much of had to be delivered to customers’ homes in the suburbs. He says the volume of work is still not up to pre-COVID levels, but it’s enough to keep the shop busy.
The slightly slower days allowed Russell to research his market and evaluate his staffing needs, which led to the help-wanted ad. With his enhanced staff he is optimistic about the future. Since 2001 he has owned a building for his shop in the NoMa (North of Massachusetts Ave.) neighborhood of Washington. It wasn’t a great neighborhood at the time – “When we first moved here I had to drive three miles to find a good sandwich,” he says – but today it’s a thriving area with hip restaurants, retail businesses, offices and a Metro station. Those businesses are customers and potential customers.
“This is a vibrant and walkable neighborhood, so a lot of people see what we do,” he says. “And we have a good team here and we are focused on growing the market. I see a very bright future.”