Monthly Articles
March 2010 Company Profile
Mail Works!
As northwest Ohio’s largest direct mail solutions provider, Mail Works’ commitment to excellence is paramount. With over 30 years of postal knowledge and mailing expertise, Mail Works brings exceptional breadth and depth of experience to its clients. Mail Works is a full service letter shop with a highly knowledgeable staff, state of the art equipment and the capacity to help you effectively grow your business and measure the results! From demographic modeling, customer profiling, and consumer lists, to specialized fulfillment and the largest automated runs, Mail Works is truly a seamless extension of your organization’s marketing department.
Using list management services and data collection, Mail Works focuses on your marketing efforts through variable offers or requests within the same mail programs you are currently using. Mail Works can handle any type or size mailing from 200 to 2 million pieces.
February 2010 Company Profile
H.O.T. Printing & Graphics
H.O.T. & Shapiros compile rich history, look to the future…
In 1976, Inez Shapiro started House of Type in a spare room in her south Toledo home with one typesetting machine. At the age of 54 she sold and delivered jobs during the day, then did the typesetting and keylining at night. Not long after, she moved her growing business and half dozen employees to a small office on Airport Highway. Within a couple years, House of Type, with its signature orange color logo, became the largest typographer in northwest Ohio.
Around the same time, her son Norman, a college student, bought his first used printing press for $50 and H.O.T. Printing was born. As the business grew and sons, Greg & Myron joined the H.O.T. team, it became necessary to move again, into an 11,000 square foot building on Erie Street in downtown Toledo where the team swelled to 30+ employees working three shifts. In 1984 House of Type transitioned into a service bureau with the acquisition of their first Mac Plus and postscript imagesetter and became H.O.T. Graphic Services.
Over the next 20 years the Shapiros purchased a string of smaller competitors as well as Envelope Mart, a wholesale to the trade supplier producing 2 million envelopes a day and shipping all over the country. Meanwhile, H.O.T. morphed once again into H.O.T. Printing & Graphics, becoming a major player on the commercial printing scene in northwest Ohio. From business cards to annual reports, businesses depended on H.O.T, for quality and consistency on their projects.
It wasn’t long before H.O.T. outgrew their downtown location and joined their “brother” company, Envelope Mart on their current Northwood, Ohio campus. Always keeping a watchful eye on current industry trends, the Shapiros are again taking H.O.T. to the next level expanding into new technologies with next-generation digital printing, direct mail, E-marketing, variable data personalization campaigns and online storefronts.
H.O.T. and the Shapiro family consider it an honor and priviledge to have served the advertising and creative community for more than 34 years, and look forward to continuing that long tradition.
