Reprints R Us.

• Author: Richards, Rick A.
• Position: Foster Printing Co. - Company Profile

They're on tables in the dentist's waiting room, in the lobby of boat dealers and in countless folders mailed to customers and potential customers.

What are they? They're reprints. Commonly, four- or six- or eight-page pieces with an article reprinted from a magazine.

And where do they come from? Chances are good they came from Foster Printing Co. of Michigan City. President Nicholas Griswold, in fact, believes Foster is the only exclusively reprint printer in the entire nation. He says the conversion from a print shop doing general commercial work to reprints came about eight years ago.

"It occurred to me that you can't be all things to all people," Griswold says. "You have to pick a specialty and go after it. "For instance, we would get business-card catalogs like everybody does, and compared to what we have to charge for our overhead and equipment, we couldn't touch them. When you see enough of that kind of thing, you say, 'We've got to get into a specialty.'"

But while the conversion itself was easy, it didn't come without pain. "When we made the commitment to get into this 100 percent, it was kind of risky," Griswold says. "You could say to yourself, 'I hope this works,' because if it doesn't you're down the tubes. You're saying good-bye to solid customers you've had for 25 years and saying hello to somebody out there you don't know."

Foster Printing's roots go back to 1924 and a backyard shop owned by Woody Foster. Griswold's father bought the print shop in 1955. He, his wife, Toni, the company's secretary-treasurer, and brother, Matt, company vice president, took over the operation in 1976. Since then, Foster has grown from a 10,000-square-foot plant with 15 employees to a 40,000-square-foot plant that now has 66 workers.

Griswold says Foster Printing has been involved with reprints since the late 1950s. His father, John, was friends with Neil Ruzic, who ran Industrial Research Publications in Beverly Shores. Ruzic used Foster for reprints of upcoming articles. He used the reprints to help him sell advertising in his various magazines. Later, he introduced Griswold to other publishers.

When Griswold decided to specialize, he remembered Ruzic's reprints and the potential they offered. "We sneaked into this thing. We didn't have a lot of cash to kick around," he recalls.

And because Foster didn't have a lot of money early on, the company wrote its own ad copy for the few trade magazines in which it advertised. Today, the company goes...