The Goodway Group : When You’re Good, You’re...

ONLY IN A printer's wildest dreams would it imagine being so good at its craft that Fortune 500 clients would request that it build another facility, in another part of the country, because those clients were relocating there.

Your work would have to be pretty impressive—and your business relationships even moreso—for those customers to consider your services indispensable. This scenario is reality for the three divisions that comprise The Goodway Group of Companies, headquartered in Jenkintown, PA. For years, Washington, DC, was the nucleus of the military defense industry, and much of its documentation was printed at Goodway's Northern Virginia facility.

"But in the late 1960s, defense firms were migrating north, and their buyers needed a regional printer that understood their specific needs," explains Noel Doherty, president of Goodway-MA. When contractors inquired about the feasibility of opening another subsidiary in Massachusetts, the answer from headquarters was a resounding, "Yes."

Throughout the 1970s, he says, firms such as General Dynamics, Raytheon, Electric Boat, General Electric, RCA and Honeywell were the foundation of Goodway-MA's business. However, during the '80s, the defense industry largely moved south and west, leaving Goodway-MA to build upon its second largest market sector: high-tech. According to Doherty, Honeywell, Digital, Hewlett-Packard, Prime and others relied on Goodway's cold webs and extensive in-house bindery capabilities to produce user manuals and other documentation. By the early 1990s, high-tech required shorter runs and quicker turns, a demand Goodway-MA met by becoming one of the region's early adopters of digital technology.

Paving the Way for Digital

"Goodway developed and hosted one of the first Web-based, just-in-time documentation ordering systems for HP," Doherty notes. "This program utilized a proprietary system of inventory pick'n'pack and digital print-on-demand (POD) to guarantee daily deliveries of key product documentation to the back end of HP's production lines." By the new millennium, hardware and software documentation had migrated to CDs or downloadable PDFs but, by then, Goodway's commitment to digital technology, combined with its burgeoning mailing and fulfillment capabilities, had paved the way for new opportunities.

Higher education, direct marketing, product resellers, franchisers, etc., were all prime candidates for the power of digital printing and its offshoots: variable data printing (VDP) and Web-based POD. At the heart of this technology is Web-to-Print 2.0—Goodway's customizable platform that integrates print, non-print and electronic asset management tasks with 24/7 real-time reporting and analysis. Goodway-MA recently completed a three-minute informational movie to highlight the benefits of Web-to-Print 2.0, which can be viewed at www.goodwaygroup-ma.com.

Serving the Washington, DC, area since 1963, Goodway's Springfield, VA-based, full-service printing and graphic design division provides high-speed web press printing, one- to six-color sheetfed offset and a digital footprint identical to its sister facility in Massachusetts. When both plants collaborate on larger projects, they can deliver nearly 200,000 digital color impressions per shift. Goodway-VA's skilled design and production specialists also possess a wide range of Website development experience.

Goodway-VA has positioned itself to capitalize on new opportunities, as customer loyalties are increasingly redefined toward value-driven vendor partnerships. According to Robert Perotti Jr., president, "Our reputation for delivering the best value in the Washington, DC, market and our unusually quick turnaround, from design to final product, are the keys to our remaining relevant and enjoying excellent client retention." Nowhere is this more evident than in Goodway-VA's dealings with the federal government.

It consistently ranks among the top 50 GPO print contractors and was recently listed at Number 37 in Printing Impressions' 2008 listing published in the January issue. "We quickly adapt to changing needs with creative solutions to budget constraints," Perotti says.

The Jenkintown, PA-based headquarters and marketing agency is, perhaps, the most dynamic division in the Goodway Group of Companies. Its clientele consists of Fortune 500 companies in industries such as automotive, restaurant, cable and retail. At the core is just about every automobile manufacturer imaginable: Acura, Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Ford, GMC, Honda, Jaguar, KIA, Land Rover, Lexus, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Suzuki, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo.

"With more than 30 years of specialized experience in retail marketing, we are the experts in providing cutting-edge, turnkey marketing campaigns on a local, regional and national basis for the retail industry," explains David Wolk, president of Goodway-PA and the third generation in his family to run the business that was founded by his grandfather, Milton Wolk, in 1929. Other notable accounts include McDonalds, Mandarin Bay, Pep Boys, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Subway and Publishers Clearinghouse.

The Pennsylvania-based marketing division has regional offices in Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta and Naples, FL. According to Wolk, "Our agency is dedicated to targeted marketing and is on the vanguard of one-to-one communications—featuring print, digital, interactive, telephony and emerging media." In 2004, Goodway Group bought one of the first licenses for XMPie, a developer of cross-media dynamic publishing, to help with a direct mail campaign for General Motors. This program was sold and managed by the Pennsylvania office, and printed and mailed by the Massachusetts plant.

Industry Domination

XMPie programmers worked with Goodway to develop a program that combined data from the GM Card credit card division with offers from nearly a thousand local GM dealers to produce monthly mailers, which often exceeded 500,000 pieces—each unique to the recipient and featuring offers from the recipient's nearest dealer. At the time, this was one of the most sophisticated applications run with XMPie software. "At Goodway Group," concludes Wolk, "our mission is to dominate the industry by servicing our clients and providing the most innovative, result-oriented retail marketing on earth." PI

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