Had his father embraced a different hunch, Steve Lang might be selling gift baskets of smoked meat today.

As Lang, president of Curry Printing in West Springfield, tells it, after his father retired as an Army colonel in 1976, he looked around for a business opportunity, and came across several options, one of which was opening a franchise with Curry Copy Centers of America.

“He got out of the service fairly young and wanted to do something different,” the younger Lang said. “At one point he started thinking about buying a Hickory Farms franchise; he didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do.”

The printing idea intrigued him, however, as it did his son.

“At the time, I was a junior at UMass, going for a degree in Environmental Science,” Lang said. “My father asked me that summer if I would help him get started. As it turned out, I took a shine to it. I liked the work so much that, flash-forward 33 years, and I’m still here as the owner.”

That was a transition that occurred gradually over the years; Lang’s father still comes into work regularly, and he has a sister and a son also working at Curry, which continues to thrive on Elm Street in West Springfield as an independent shop decades after its parent company collapsed.

“The franchise went belly-up two or three years after we bought it,” Lang said. “For us, it was the college of hard knocks as we learned the business.

“In the early days, we worked well together,” he added. “His background was in accounting and business, so I always ran the equipment end of it, while he ran the business end. And the business grew every year except for the first couple of years, when we almost had to cash it in. We didn’t quite know what we were doing yet.”

But from the start, Curry offered something valuable to customers, which became a keystone of its service: speed.

“Most regular commercial printers were using metal plates; we were using paper plates, and we could turn around on a dime for short-run, on-demand printing,” Lang told BusinessWest. “We weren’t scheduling presses; you could walk in and have it done quickly.

“We’re still like that,” he continued. “When someone asks, ‘when can I have this?’ I ask, ‘when do you need it?’ We schedule according to customers’ needs. If somebody comes in and needs 500 playbills or programs for a weekend performance, and their printer dropped the ball, we can get right on it and get it done for them.”

It’s a story other printers have told, about the need to satisfy the time requirements of an increasingly demanding customer base. The old model, Lang said, is reflected in an old cartoon that used to hang in many businesses; it pictures a man rolling around on the ground, laughing, and asking, “you want it when?”

“We turned that around and ask, ‘when do you want it?’” he explained. “That’s been our niche, and a key to our success. We’ve got small customers, big customers, and they love us because we’re their ace in the hole; we won’t let them down.”

Paper Roots

Curry has developed other niches as well. In addition to typical print jobs like brochures, newsletters, postcards, and sell sheets, Lang prints blueprints and architectural drawings — off hard copies or PDF files — and also prints and binds reports, manuals, booklets, and training materials. Clients run the gamut from small businesses to nonprofit agencies and local government offices.

“We no longer do projects for personal use,” he said. “We’re not really pushing that. It’s mostly small businesses — and large ones, too — that come to us with projects that they can’t or don’t want to do in-house. They know we’re available to do it when it needs to get done.”

A newer niche, as a full-service sign shop (under the moniker O’Lang Sign) has been “a savior for us,” Lang said, providing a steady influx of new business. He said Curry has long specialized in large-format printing (say, 4- by 8-foot or larger), on surfaces ranging from murals to vehicles to trade-show displays, but a move from water-based dyes to solvent-based inks that don’t smear has provided the added benefit of not having to laminate the sign.

“We saw a lot of potential there, so last fall we purchased a 54-inch printer that uses solvent-based inks,” he said. “We’ll still laminate if it’s something that might be subjected to abrasion, but that’s really opened up a lot of opportunities to do signage of all kinds.”

Overall, Curry’s business grew steadily after an uncertain first couple of years, but that growth pattern hit a bump in the late 1990s when a paradigm shift toward desktop publishing persuaded many printers, particularly those specializing in smaller jobs, to move toward digital technology. But Curry rode that wave.

“We grasped the digital part early on, to the point that, today, we’re almost 100% digital; we’ve replaced all the traditional offset with digital,” Lang said. “We saw the handwriting on the wall, and the industry was saying, ‘if you don’t start grasping digital, think about selling your business and doing something else.’

“Even in the early days, in the early 1980s,” he continued, “we had the first color copier commercially available in the valley, and also one of the first fax services offered as a convenience for customers.”

Lang said Curry, like all other successful print shops, is always looking at the latest technology to keep up with industry trends, but it can be a challenge.

“We always try to get the latest high-speed copier, ones that bind online, collate online, we try to keep up with what’s out there. But the toys are getting more expensive, and mistakes can be made, that’s for sure,” he said, recalling, as one example, a state-of-the-art digital press he obtained from an Israeli company in 1996.

“I signed onto a five-year lease,” he recalled, “and for the first couple of years, nobody could touch me. But then it became obsolete very quickly.

“You have to be careful what you get and how long you’re tied into it,” he continued. “Technology is moving very quickly, and sometimes you shoot from the hip; you think, ‘this thing is great.’ A lot of times it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. Nobody has a crystal ball, but I do keep up with the industry and associations, and try to make educated guesses about where to go.”

Off the Presses

Printing is a business that relies on the economic health of its clients — often, printing costs are cut early when budgets are tight — and the current recession “has definitely affected us,” Lang said. But he’s learned how to adjust to dips in what has been a tumultuous decade for printing, starting with an event that sent businesses in many industries reeling.

“Prior to 9/11, we thought we would always continue to grow, and it was a lot easier back then,” Lang said. “Since 9/11, we’ve had to scale back and be a lot more careful with our expenses.

“We’re finding that we are busy enough now — although I’d always like to be busier — and I think things are getting better,” he added. “We’re still here after 33 years, and I don’t know how to do anything else. I’m optimistic about the future. I get really nervous when the pipeline dries up, when things get slow, and I think about, ‘what should I be doing?’ But by the time I come up with a solution, we’re getting busy again. We have a good, diverse customer base that keeps us going, so that, when one area is not doing well, another area picks up.”

Lang recognizes the wealth of printing talent in the valley and isn’t averse to sending a customer to a competitor if a job arises that he can’t handle. He prefers that, he said, to people spending their dollars on Internet-based printers.

“Why should their money leave the valley? It’s better spent here,” he said. “If someone comes to me with 50,000 brochures, I’m probably not going to do that, but I know people who can.”

It’s almost like an extended family — echoed in the Lang family at Curry, who still ask, “when do you need it?” 33 years after that close call with Hickory Farms.

Joseph Bednar can be reached

at bednar@businesswest.com