Local Alaska printers: producing tangible marketing materials.

• Author: Anderson, Tasha
• Position: MARKETING - Company overview

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Every business in Alaska has some kind of printing needs. While simple printing can generally be handled in-house, when it comes to marketing and PR materials, going to a professional shop is mandatory for high quality, big quantity, or large format printing, whether it's a trade show display, an annual report, a car wrap, or a public art installation. Alaska has many local printing options, all of which are eager to aid their clients in finding the right printed solution.

Alaska Litho

Alaska Litho (aklitho.com) has a unique history, having been founded in 1948 by Pastor H.E. Buyer as an offshoot to print his church bulletins, according to current Alaska Litho Owner Travis McCain. "In 2000 Rich Stone started an employee ownership plan and ever since the employees have owned a portion of the business," McCain says. McCain and Rich Dudas purchased Rich Stone's ownership interest in 2014. The company now has fourteen employees in two locations, Copy Works in the Jordan Creek mall and Alaska Litho at 8420 Airport Boulevard in Juneau.

Jenny Fremlin, PhD, Alaska Litho's media psychology specialist, says, "We offer business cards, rack cards, newsletters, magazines, direct mail, and forms, plus large format printing which covers things like yard signs, banners, posters, and car decals. Everything we do is custom, so there's really no limit to the products we provide other than imagination." Alaska Litho is setting up to offer more "retail type print jobs," Fremlin says, such as canvas photo prints.

In addition to printing and installation, they offer marketing through media services and their pre-press team offers design services. "Our marketing services are pretty unique to fit our customers' needs. A lot of what we do is consulting and training to make sure small businesses are using their marketing budgets efficiently and carrying their message across print and digital consistently," Fremlin says.

Alaska Litho currently primarily provides services to local and regional tourism companies, Alaska Native Corporations, small businesses, city and state government, and individuals. Fremlin says, "Print is a huge piece of effective communication. From mailers and business cards to giveaway items with your logo, you get to tell your own story with print materials and then carry that across into your digital outreach."

Fremlin says it's vital for businesses to have a consistent message across all of their print, online, or social media materials. She says that in a recent project for Taku Store, a local smokehouse, "we noticed discrepancies in the wording across the existing print and digital materials. We worked with them to edit and refine the content of the print catalog and their website so that when we started connecting it all together with the...