Sharpe's new building was previously a furniture store.
By Ed Avis
APDSP member Sharpe Co. has enjoyed solid growth over the past few years, in addition to acquiring two other companies and starting a new division. But all that new business came with a cost: Their headquarters location in Winston-Salem, North Carolina was just too small.
“We bought a commercial printing company about three years ago that had its own building, and we purchased a rubber testing company and started a safety division,” explains Zach Sharpe, vice president of Sharpe Co.
The businesses were divided into two buildings, one for the commercial printing and the other for reprographics and the other lines. They totaled 21,000 square feet. With 40 employees in those locations, space was tight. (Sharpe Co. has about 30 more employees divided among its five other locations in North Carolina.)
“We were having to send commercial print jobs up the street, and they would send the wide-format and reprographic jobs back to us,” Sharpe says. “We decided it would be easier for us to have it all under a single roof.”
North Carolina is known for its furniture manufacturing, so it’s fitting that the Sharpes
found an empty furniture retail store for their new location. The building’s open layout is ideal for their production area, and it is twice the size of the two previous buildings combined. Sharpe says they had to remove the carpeting and build out some offices and cubicles to make the space suitable for them. They started that work last February, and took three or four months.
That was the easy part – next came the actual move.
“The biggest challenge was moving the commercial offset press,” Sharpe says. “It had to be broken down into six sections.”
Riggers were brought in to move the giant press pieces to the new location, where a trench had to be dug in the foundation so that workers could get underneath. The process took about a week, during which time the jobs that normally would go on that press were outsourced.
“Once we finished that, we moved on to the digital press, and moving that took three or four days,” Sharpe says. “Then we moved the two big Vutek flatbeds. We moved them one at a time, so we could keep doing those jobs the whole time.”
Altogether the move took three weeks, ending in late June. Technicians from four printer manufacturers helped with the presses. The business remained open the whole time.
“It was a good move to make, because we got one of the largest jobs in the history of the company in early July – graphics outfitting a client’s 80 retail locations,” Sharpe says. “The graphics had to be produced, packaged and crated, and then shipped out. We wouldn’t have had the space in the other building.”