Page 6 - BusinessWest May 12, 2025

Gary Stone
says resilience
has been the
company’s best
character trait.
Photo by
Bob Zemba, Simple
Truth Imaging
about what your life goals are and what’s meaningful to you. I
always wanted to own a business, and so did he.”
Fast-forward a year or so, and White and Stone were talking
with BusinessWest inside a storefront (a former coffee roaster) in
the Heritage Park Plaza in East Longmeadow about their new ven-
ture. They didn’t have any furniture at the time, so they talked while
sitting in lawn chairs.
Mostly, they talked about leaving corporate America and going
into business for themselves. As for their chosen enterprise, they
said it came about after considerable discussion about what was
needed in the community, what would succeed business-wise, and
how they could best deploy their respective talents. In short, they
said it was a work in process, a trend that has continued for the
past two decades.
“We weren’t sure exactly what we’d do at that point, but
we did know that we could sell, and we could market it,” said
Stone. “Those are good skill sets to have if you’re going to start a
business.”
Their start, as noted earlier, was as a basic print shop, providing
many of the same services as the Staples across the street.
“We were just doing copies and prints, and it was just ‘the low-
est price wins,’” Stone recalled. “It was a very frustrating, very-low-
margin kind of business model that we didn’t enjoy much.”
White recalled that the two struggled in the beginning, print-
ing flyers, business cards, and similar products, and tried to be all
things to its clients, and that formula wasn’t working.
“We’d think it up, design it up, and try to produce it,” he recalled.
“And we found a love and passion for designing it, making it, and
installing it.”
Relatively early on, White and Stone recognized an opportunity
with vehicle graphics, an emerging market at the time, and bought
a printer that enabled them to produce those products. This was
the company’s start in the large-format business.
“We saw the vehicle-graphics market and said, ‘no one owns
this,’” White recalled. “We said, ‘let’s be known for something, let’s
be the guys,’ and strategically, we went after it.
“What you had was a convergence of technologies to make it
happen,” he went on. “It wasn’t just the printing ... it was the print-
ing, the inks, the media, and the adhesives; you could print some-
thing on vinyl, but would it stick? We were at the right place at the
right time.”
Covering All the Bases
They started with smaller businesses that provided an opportu-
nity to learn while doing, said White, adding that the company even-
tually moved on to fleets, such as the 1,200 Edible Arrangements
vehicles, and work that was truly national in scope.
“We got really good at it,” said White, adding that the company
would survive the loss of the Edible Arrangements account — one
“I remember
looking at my
schedule at one
point, I was going
to be gone 17
out of the next
23 weekends.
And I said, ‘that’s
enough; I’ve
got to make a
change.’”
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MAY 12, 2025
Business W est