Day Dream Publishing: world's largest calendar publisher is now in Indiana.

• Author: Mengle, Rev
• Position: Company Profile

Mike Bursaw runs a multimillion-dollar company, yet it wouldn't be out of place to find the likeness of Kathy Ireland hanging on his office wall. Or Fred Flintstone, or perhaps a "Jurassic Park" dinosaur.

That's because Bursaw is president of Day Dream Publishing, which prints millions of calendars every year: still images of everything and everybody including swimsuit models, sports stars, Hollywood movies and works of art. The Indianapolis company currently has more than 200 titles in print, including calendars featuring supermodels Kathy Ireland and Elle MacPherson; movies such as "Jurassic Park" and Disney productions "Aladdin" and the upcoming "The Lion King"; and celebrities including romance-novel cover boy Fabio, country singer Garth Brooks and basketball's Shaquille O'Neal. The company even printed a Michael Jordan calendar before His Airness retired from professional basketball.

"This is a business of lots of different tastes," Bursaw says, "so to be successful, you have to have lots of different calendars."

Day Dream's product line ranges from medium- and large-size wall calendars to pocket calendars to monthly and daily page calendars. Its list of customers is equally diverse: from retail giants such as Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target to much smaller gift stores, including the family-owned variety. Day Dream also sells to customers in 21 foreign countries.

Last year the company produced 11 million calendars, up from the 4.7 million it sold in 1991, the year it moved to Indianapolis from Santa Barbara, Calif. This year, the company projects sales of nearly 14 million calendars, and in 1996, 21 million.

How exactly did the world's largest calendar publisher arrive in Indianapolis?

Day Dream was founded by Chip Conk back in 1981, while he was a college student at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His first project was a calendar featuring some of the "big men on campus." (A copy of the month featuring Conk--he was Mr. March--can be found along a busy wall of the art department.)

"His first year, he had $10,000 in sales, and his costs were $15,000," Bursaw says. "But he had a vision."

And the fledgling company kept pursuing that vision. Sales topped 100,000 calendars in 1984, the 1 million mark in 1987.

There was only one problem: While the Santa Barbara area was a beautiful climate, labor costs were high, and finding qualified people was difficult. Indianapolis-based commercial printer Shepard Poorman Communications...