2024 Innovator of the Year: Blooming Color Transforms Into Digital Powerhouse

Editor's Note: Innovation may look different for every company; however, the industry leaders make innovation part of their DNA. By utilizing new technology, developing comprehensive investment strategies, implementing unique human resources practices, and integrating top-of-the-line processes, they can stand out as true innovators.

Our six Printing Impressions' 2024 Innovators of the Year were nominated by printing industry experts and consultants who identified them as pushing the boundaries of innovation. The business tactics and philosophies they employ may provide some inspiration to take your company to similar, greater heights.

The summary of Blooming Color that follows shares what makes this company innovative, interesting, and exceptional. The insight it presents may provide the inspiration you need to take your company to a new level, or in a new direction.

If you were to look at Blooming Color today, would you ever guess that it all started as a Minuteman Press franchise?

“We started back in 1988, our original ownership group bought that [franchise] and it was three partners,” Rosemarie Breske Garvey, president of Blooming Color, says. “One was a silent partner and then the other two were the ones that ran what was then the actual front desk. It was just a little local copy shop when our original ownership group bought the location, we had one- and two-color offset presses and then we had the plastic colored boxes when digital became a thing.”

Blooming Color’s president Rosemarie Breske Garvey and CEO Brian Scott stand in front of the company's HP Indigo 100K digital printing press. | Credit: Blooming Color

The Lombard, Illinois-based commercial printer has made leaps and bounds since its early days as a franchise. It stands strong with close to 200 employees and offers an array of services like digital printing, wide-format printing, and signage and wayfinding.

Even when it was a small franchise, Breske Garvey says that Blooming Color has never shied away from a job. She explains that “no” is not in the company’s vocabulary, and that ideology has earned the company the reputation it has today.

“All the way back then, the answer was always ‘yes,’” she says. “And so, our shop there in Naperville, Illinois, became the place where if you needed a print job done, that’s where you would go. From the very beginning, we were born in quick print. And no matter what it took, we got the job done.”

Breske Garvey explains that as Blooming Color’s original ownership group expanded into the 1990s and early 2000s, it had bought other franchises and independent printers, and grew to about nine locations throughout the western suburbs of Chicago. All of which garnered the reputation that if you needed a print job done, Minuteman Press was the place to go.

“All of those locations really became known as the place where the answer is ‘yes,’ you get what you need, and we just did not fail,” Breske Garvey says. “And we were really excited about that for a long time and the energy has really stayed with us to this day.”

Blossoming into Bloom

As the company continued to rapidly expand, Breske Garvey explains that it needed an offset print partner to assist with some of the larger projects it was taking on at the time. In 2006, after working with Blooming Color for almost four years as an offset partner, the group acquired it.

Breske Garvey explains that at the time, the group who they had purchased Blooming Color from was into prepress, but the Minuteman Press group was more interested in the offset equipment. So, she says that the original Blooming Color owners kept the prepress equipment and moved to downtown Chicago.

“After that, Blooming Color here in Lombard, Illinois, became the hub for all these spoke locations,” she says. “Then we started to consolidate production in all those shops. As you can imagine, having eight or nine locations, you’re not running at full efficiency. So, we brought all those people here, and started to shut down those storefront locations.”

A Digital Revolution

As Blooming Color continued to excel, Breske Garvey says that it was seeking digital equipment that could match the quality of its offset equipment.

“We had this offset press quality now that was awesome, but we really needed digital print quality that was going to match offset,” she says. “So Brian Scott, our CEO, went to Dscoop, talked to everybody, and bought our first HP Indigo in 2009. That was what reset our trajectory from that point on, it kind of set off this digital revolution for us.”

But the revolution didn’t come without some trepidation. Breske Garvey explains that as Blooming Color was first making the shift over to digital, there was some hesitation from its older ownership group and its legacy employees who were used to running one- and two-color presses and “only knew digital to mean copy machine.”

So, to help them along, Breske Garvey says they started educating their employees to help them see what digital was capable of.

“One of the key points from that timeline, after we bought that first Indigo, we had probably 30 Konica Minolta, Xerox, and Canon color boxes,” she notes. “We got rid of all of those and we ran everything on one Indigo and that became the game changer at that point in time for what it was. And then our team really started to see what digital printing meant. They started to see the quality that was coming off of an Indigo. That was fantastic from a ‘cultural shift for the company’ perspective.”

After purchasing its first HP Indigo, Breske Garvey says Blooming Color went on to purchase seven more, with five still running to this day. In March, the company took out its last remaining offset press and is in the midst of reconfiguring the entire plant.

Blooming Color's all-digital production facility.

“We have moved all our equipment, we’ve had the floors re-epoxied, and we’ve painted the walls. It’s what I’m calling the glow-up of Blooming Color,” Breske Garvey says.

Now that Blooming Color is fully digital, it would only make sense for its storefront to reflect that as well. Thanks to its fleet of Indigos, Breske Garvey says that Blooming Color is fully shifting its attention to e-commerce, explaining that’s where the company’s largest clients are.

“E-commerce is where all of our growth is today, and we’re really fortunate to work with some really great multinational brands,” she says. “We’re just so fortunate that people have been very kind and have liked working with us and we’ve seemed to have performed well for them. And it’s a wonderful position to be in where people come to you and want to do business with you.”

Blooming Color started testing the waters of e-commerce back in 2015 with Gelato — a global print-on-demand platform that had just made its way to the U.S. from Norway.

“Working with them really gave us the opportunity to learn how to do e-commerce and how to do orders of 25 cards or 50 business cards, which now seems like such small things, but we were coming out of the environment where everything had a job ticket and someone would write up an order,” Breske Garvey says. “Then all of a sudden we started getting 10 orders a day for this, 40 orders a day for this, 100 orders a day for this. We started to see that volume tick up and Gelato was wonderful and we grew with them for a long time. We don’t work with them anymore, but we will always credit them as our first foray into that.”

If you were to ask Breske Garvey why she believes Blooming Color is innovative, she’ll tell you that Blooming Color isn’t afraid to take risks.

“When I step back and look at the team, it continues to be our ability to take risks in the right way for partners that we value, for our team who we value,” she says. “To be innovative, it means stepping up to the plate and taking on that risk and making sure that your decisions are sound, and not being afraid.”

“Before we got our first Indigo 15 years ago, I would’ve never imagined we would be in this space. And now technology moves so quickly, so we have to move just as quickly, if not quicker, to embrace what those new things are. We need to continue to be agile and adaptive so that when somebody says, ‘Can you do this?’ we’ll say, ‘Absolutely.’”