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Miller Blueprint's location on 10th Street in Austin in 1932.
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Interior of Miller Blueprint's 10th Street location.
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John Miller, founder of Miller Blueprint.
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Miller Blueprint's building in 1944.
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Friden Calculator display inside Miller Blueprint in the 1960s.
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Newspaper article and advertisement about Miller Blueprint's open house in 1940.
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Robert Miller, son of founder John Miller.
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The Miller siblings.
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Miller Imaging & Digital Solutions' current downtown Austin location.
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Luci Miller, current president of Miller Imaging & Digital Solutions
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By Ed Avis
When John and Louise Miller founded Miller Blue Print in Austin, Texas in 1920, they could have never guessed that their granddaughter, Luci Miller, would be running the company a century later.
“They started the company in June 1920, when the Spanish Flu had just ended,” says Miller, who owns the company with her brother Bob and nephew Josh. “It’s interesting that we’re celebrating the 100th anniversary during this COVID pandemic and they started the company just as the country was getting over the Spanish Flu!”
That strange coincidence is not the only similarity between the Miller Blue Print of the 1920s and today’s Miller Imaging & Digital Solutions. If a customer from the early days were magically transported to the company’s current lobby, he or she would recognize the same entrepreneurial drive and customer focus as existed back then.
“When you look at how a company survives that long, you always have to start with the culture and core values of the family that owns it,” notes Steve Coyle, Miller’s vice president of marketing sales and service and until recently the company’s COO. “Being customer-centric is a good starting point, and having empowered employees with positive attitudes.”
Coyle adds that customers frequently comment that they bought their architecture supplies from Miller while they were at the University of Texas decades ago, or even remember coming in with their parents when they were kids. Art and architecture supplies brought in the crowds back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, he says.
“I think the Millers have done a wonderful job of listening to their customers and understanding where they want to go,” Coyle says. “And they still do that today.”
Blueprints Over the Street
John Miller launched the company because he was working for the highway department as a draftsman and saw the need for graphics to be outsourced, his granddaughter says.
In those days blueprints had to be exposed in sunlight, and the company hung their prints across Austin’s Congress Avenue to accomplish that. As the company grew, they expanded into surveying equipment, maps, and even aerial photography (flying their own aerials ended when the government requisitioned their airplane during World War II).
Miller stocked topographical maps for the whole state prior to the availability of digital downloads. “In his later years, it was my grandfather’s brain dance to re-stock all the topographical maps in precise alphabetical order,” Luci Miller says.
John’s son Robert, who was Luci Miller’s father, joined Miller Blueprint in 1946 after service in the Army Signal Corps during World War II. Robert had graduated from the University of Texas in 1944 with a degree in physics, so he brought serious brain power to the business.
“My father was a freaking braniac who could do a 30-year amortization table in his head,” Miller says.
Robert helped the company expand further with sales in furniture, supplies and eventually calculators. One 1960s-era photo (see the photo gallery) shows an elaborate in-store display for Friden Calculators, called “The Thinking Machine of American Business.”
“Even back then they were always looking for new and different things to sell,” Miller says. “Fifty percent of our revenue was supplies – Leroy points, Koh-I-Noor points – my dad would order furniture by the truckload. We had an entire warehouse dedicated to that.”
Luci Joins the Business
Luci Miller’s earliest memories of her family’s business was playing with the old fashioned switchboard on Saturday mornings. She and her four siblings would take turns playing operator – evidently no important business calls were coming in on Saturdays!
She began working at the company in 1975 at age 15. She helped her father and grandfather in the supplies department. By that point her father had become president of the company; her grandfather died in 1979.
“My grandfather was there until he had a heart attack and couldn’t come back to work the next day; he lived in a nursing home for a month and then passed away,” Miller says. Not only had the senior Miller launched the family business, he also had had a powerful influence on his granddaughter: “He was my best friend.”
Luci graduated from the University of Texas with a business degree in 1984. Her first task after graduation was to open Miller Blueprint’s second location in northern Austin.
“Business was good at the time, but it was just at the beginning of the late ‘80s recession, and we thought about delaying the opening,” she says. “We took the risk and it was a very difficult time.”
The branch survived the recession, but Luci felt a different calling: In 1989 she left Miller Blueprint to get experience outside of the family business. She was in insurance and legal copies for eight years and learned more about sales.
“I developed some confidence outside the business and some sales experience,” she says. “Then I was ready to come back to the business. Dad and Bob were gracious enough to make room for me.”
Luci’s father worked until the day he died in 2005. By then Luci was the company’s general manager; she became president in 2009.
Transition to Digital
Because many of Miller’s clients required mylars and photographic enlargements, the company had a large photographic department well into the 1990s. The company did the bulk of its plan printing on diazo equipment at that time, and even did some old fashioned, hand-dipped blueprints for surveyors who specifically needed that product.
“We were probably the last company in Texas still doing that,” Miller says.
But digital technology was slowly coming -- in 1996 the company installed an Oce 9800 plain paper printer.
“That was a huge turning point,” Miller says. “I remember being so excited about the first job we got for that machine. It was the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and I ran the job in the Dallas office of Oce because our machine hadn’t been installed yet. That changed the world obviously.”
For the past 10 years the company has offered a proprietary digital plan room to clients. Local school districts and general contractors are the biggest users of it. Miller earns a fee for every project that is posted.
“The plan room was originally designed by Mark Luncsford (owner of Best Imaging Solutions in Chicago) and myself when I was at BHFX (a repro firm in Arlington Heights, Illinois),” Coyle says. “We did it with two software programmers. And it still functions today.”
“It’s an important part of our success,” Miller says.
On the color side, Miller installed a Canon CLC 100 color copier for small-format work and a Versatech electrostatic plotter for large-format. They added a Tangent large-format flatbed color scanner in the early 2000s. The company’s deep experience in photographic work smoothed the transition to digital color.
“We had a group of guys in the photo department whose skills easily translated over to graphics,” Coyle says. “The skill set was there, and they were willing to learn the computer programs. So that was a nice transition.”
In the early years of digital color, Miller focused on architectural renderings and other projects for their core AEC customers. That eventually evolved into fine art printing since many in the architecture field also are connected to the art world. The company supports the arts community by each month choosing a “Featured Artist,” whose work is displayed on their web site and in the company’s stores.
By 2015 the company had added signage and banners to their product list, and today their equipment includes HP latex printers, a CET flatbed printer and an iEcho cutter.
The investments in color have paid off: Sales of graphics work have increased from $100,000 in 2010 to over $1 million now, Miller says. “We feel like that’s our growth market for the future,” she says. “But reprographics remains the most important. We’re blessed with enough construction in Austin that even with the lesser amount of printing, it’s still substantial.”
Giving Back to Austin
Miller Imaging & Digital Solutions – the company changed its name in 2015 -- has two locations in Austin today, and regularly gives back to the community that has supported them for the past century.
“The Millers have always been very community-oriented,” Coyle says. “They love Austin and central Texas.”
The company routinely provides donated graphics to charitable organizations needing promotions, and Miller regularly participates in industry organizations such as the AIA, SMPS and ABC chapters. The firm also has helped preserve Austin and Texas history – they donated their enormous collection of aerial photos and maps to the Texas Natural Resources Information System.
What does the future hold? Another family member at the helm, for sure: Josh Miller, Bob’s son, joined the company in 1996 and is now the director of operations.
“What’s coming next is continued reinvention,” Luci says. “And it’s very relevant that we have the fourth generation, Josh, already here.”