Business makes for strange bedfellows. Like Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Las Vegas’ Caesars Palace and the government of Zambia.
All are among the customers who have ordered about 27 million color postcards from Bill Fedus in the last two years.
Fedus, who co-founded Mitchell Graphics Inc. in the basement of his home 20 years ago, shares an 8-by-10-foot office with his general manager and his production manager. All are awaiting a move this year to a new 50,000-square-foot plant nearby that will more than triple the company’s living space and printing capacity.
Mitchell Graphics has grown from about a dozen employees to 60 in the last decade, a substantial gain in an industry where four out of five companies have fewer than 20 employees.
At the same time, the private firm’s revenues have been expanding at a 20 percent-plus annual rate.
Mitchell Graphics, named for a local street, had long been making a highly seasonal living, publishing tourist-industry brochures out of this picturesque city, which looks itself as if it’s posing for a postcard along a stretch of Lake Michigan.
In 1981 Fedus decided to expand by printing color postcards on which institutions and businesses could print advertising and promotional messages for their patrons, alumni and customers. After several years, the business began to take off, he says.
Mitchell now sells postcards to politicians, real estate brokers, universities, art galleries, artists, architects, motel chains and retailers, among others.
About half the business is for 3,000 artists and art galleries who use the postcards to stir interest in coming exhibits.
The company publishes up to 30 different color postcards on a single press run.
Its charge for printing a standard-size color postcard ranges from $298, or 59.6 cents per card, for an order of 500, to $519, or 8.6 cents each, for an order of 6,000. Customers typically supply the photos.
“We spread the cost of the plates, the make-readies among 30 customers, which brings the cost down,” Fedus says.
