Commercial printing in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Appeal mailings, association catalogs, event programs and annual reports all need prepress, press, bindery and mailing, and all four are here. It is also the work most likely to need every department on the same job.

The reason a job like an appeal mailing or an annual report is worth keeping in one building is that it touches every department. Prepress makes the plates, the press runs the sheets, bindery folds and stitches and trims them, and mailing addresses and drops them. Split across vendors, each hand-off is a day and somebody to chase.

An appeal package is the clearest example: a letter, a reply device and a reply envelope all going into one outer envelope. The inserter puts all of it into a single envelope by machine, which is the difference between a mailing and a week of volunteers around a table.

Programs, catalogs and reports are bindery work at the other end — saddle stitched or coil bound, collated and trimmed on the same machine, and cut on a programmable cutter.

What runs here

It is one floor for all of it: offset printing in process and spot color, digital printing for the short runs, prepress and direct-to-plate, bindery, and direct mail. What comes out of it is on the products page; what it comes off is on the equipment page.