This is part of a year-long ‘Love for Local’ series called NB365: portraits of New Brunswick entrepreneurs, businesses and organizations. Huddle is a media partner with Love for Local. Today, we hear from  Beth Crowell  of  Mayday Print / Swagshop.ca. 

I started working part-time at Mayday while attending the College of Craft & Design where I graduated with a Creative Graphics Diploma. It was my love of graphic design that drew me towards a career as a graphic artist, and when offered a full-time job upon graduation, I jumped at the chance to work at a local company. It was here where the draw to do the extra for customers began as I really enjoyed the interaction with customers who looked to me for advice and support. When the Day’s decided to retire, I offered to purchase the business and luckily they agreed wholeheartedly. Overnight I went from employee to employer. This was in 2003 and what a ride it has been.

I know that the services we offer can be ordered with a few clicks of a mouse. Online large print and promotional companies with million-dollar budgets are being advertised everywhere you look. Despite that, we have very loyal customers who deal with us year after year. This show of support is something we appreciate so much. For this reason, we make it a priority to return the loyalty. We shop local, we eat local, we use local suppliers as much as we can. We support local businesses in every way possible and if we can’t use their services, we help share and market for them to our audience. The best thing about this is the friendships we have forged in the process. Some absolutely phenomenal mentors and friends whom we deal with on a regular basis have enriched our lives and improved the morale and loyalty of our fantastic staff as well. The staff are the pieces that make a business work well, and I’m blessed with a fantastic engaged team whom I find it a joy to work with every day.

Although I love nothing better than the smell of ink and a freshly printed job hot off the press, customers are requiring more. They want custom quantities, more personalized mail, less wastage, and more on-demand production. This has led us into digital on-demand printing. Our current Xerox digital press prints, folds, staples, hole punches all with press quality printing, making it clear that this is our future. We are also becoming quite the swag experts, having taken lots of industry training and constantly upgrading our knowledge. Loving what you sell is the main reason we do so well with promotional products. We just all love cool swag, it’s a passion we share. Our goal is to continue to learn new decorating methods, finding the best products, becoming more efficient with less waste and more environmentally friendly procedures and generally grow and learn as part of a great team.

Supporting local businesses has a real impact because, without our local customers and friends, work would be just a job. If we support each other in the way that Maritimers are famous for, the sky isn’t the limit: we can go much farther.