INSERTS EAST — FLYING UNDER THE RADAR

SOMETIMES A simple plan can be made to look brilliant when it is backed by hard work and dedication to quality customer service. But perhaps what has really helped Inserts East, a free-standing insert printing specialist based in Pennsauken, NJ, is its ability to lay low in a niche populated by some large, national printers.

Make no mistake about it. Inserts East—though coined a boutique printer by company President Nick Maiale—is not a small potatoes establishment. At $50 million a year in annual sales, it is the envy of many smaller, mainstream commercial operations.

But Nick and his father Gino—who managed the company from its inception in 1972, when it was known as Able Printing—have expanded the company backed by old-fashioned values since acquiring it in 1996. In the beginning, the facility existed to produce coldset web/shopper’s guide-type products. In fact, the primary title it produced was called the Shopper’s Guide.

Keeping Jobs Local

The senior Maiale left the company in 1988 to start his own print brokerage, G&F Graphic Services. But in 1996, when Able Printing and the Shopper’s Guide were sold to Newport Media, which planned to move printing operations to its Long Island facility, the Maiales came to the rescue, saving a couple dozen jobs while vowing to grow the company.

And grown it has: when the elder Maiale acquired the plant, there were only 24 employees and revenues of $2 million. Today, there are 200 employees in the 110,000-square-foot facility generating $50 million in annual sales. G&F Graphic Services, separate but located on-site with Inserts East, brokers out work such as direct mail, large signage and specialty items for large, national retailers.

“We are successful because of the faith customers have in us and the fact that we never let the grass grow under our feet,” Nick Maiale says. “We’re constantly investing in technology to do a better job in prepress and the pressroom. We’re very much in touch with our customers, we listen to them and we grow with them. We’re always trying to do a better job.”