Print shop owner lends a hand to art students

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Tina Paradiso calls herself the accidental entrepreneur.

Several years ago, while working as an outside salesperson in the packaging industry, her elderly father and ailing daughter stopped her in her tracks. She needed to be home with her family.

“There’s a certain way that I wanted to be able to take care of my family,” Paradiso recalled. But her nature is to stay busy. “I always have to stay busy; I don’t know how not to.”

A friend told her what she needed to do was become her own boss.

“Oh no, no, no, no, no. I’m a salesperson. I make other people money,” she told the friend. But the gears were turning and her interest was piqued. Four months later she had made a list of a dozen area companies for sale that she thought might be a good fit for her. Soon she had whittled the list to three that sounded fun.

“And I took it to my unofficial board of directors, people that I trust, and I said, ‘Which one do you want me to do?’ And I picked the one nobody wanted me to do,” said the owner of Imprintable Solutions Ink, formerly We’re Forms. “So the idea was, it has foundational customers. It has a foundational team already in place. And I would be able to have the flexibility to be able to take care of my family when my family needed it.”

That flexibility turned out to be good for both Paradiso and her new business. In its five years under her tutelage, Imprintable Solutions has grown from a $1 million company with four employees to a $1.5 million business with nine staffers.

Two new contracts out of New York City and California will help grow sales by 12 percent in the next year, she added, and likely will lead to a need for more staffers.

Paradiso purchased the 30-year-old We’re Forms five years ago. The company previously was a distributor of branded products such as cups, pens and other marketing products, as well as business forms and other printed materials. As such, We’re Forms came readymade with strategic manufacturing partnerships that Paradiso has leveraged to grow and differentiate the company.

She has transformed the small company to one that now offers an array of printing and branding services. Imprintable Solutions has added production equipment to its new College Avenue shop, which enables the company to do embroidery work on-site.

“The cool thing with production is, not only are we able to be of service to customers differently, we’re also doing wholesale work for some of our competitors who don’t have direct-to-garment or embroidery,” Paradiso said. “So we’re tying all of those pieces in, which has allowed us to add four jobs.”

While at a trade show this summer Paradiso purchased a direct-to-garment printer that allows Imprintable Solutions to take any photo and print it on a T-shirt. Days after buying the printer she made four phone calls and booked three events. Since then, the company has participated in a number of events at which attendees can take selfies or upload their own photos to the company’s software, and Imprintable Solutions can print a T-shirt on the spot.

The company’s transformation didn’t happen overnight. For the first six months of ownership, Paradiso enlisted the help of staffers to come up with a new name. A whiteboard allowed employees to write down words that described what the company did. Eighteen names came from that whiteboard, and from there the name Imprintable Solutions Ink was pulled.

Growth can be a struggle, Paradiso acknowledged, because you need money to grow.

“When I started out I got my first loan and that’s cool. It’s like, I kind of want to refinance and do some consolidating because I want to buy equipment,” Paradiso explained. “There’s no secret to running a profitable business. It’s you increase sales, you keep your costs down. But then you have to find the resources to grow. And that’s a challenge when you’re small, when you’re trying to do some cool things.”

Yet, she has found a way. Paradiso also owns Sailor Bags, a company she purchased last year that makes bags and other products out of genuine virgin sailcloth. The products have a lifetime guarantee and are sold both direct-to-consumer from the company’s website and wholesale into niche markets and stores.

Sailor Bags has partnered with the nonprofit Creativity Shell, which will take spent bags whose handles may have torn and will teach individuals how to sew with them.

“What the youth are going to be doing is they’re going to be creating their own brand with the Sailor Bag. So they might take the rest of the strap off and put a new strap on, maybe change the zipper, put some buttons on it,” Paradiso explained. “They’re going to take these bags and turn them into giving bags, where they give them to (nonprofit) organizations.”

The partnership is one of several community service commitments Paradiso has made. In September, Imprintable Solutions started a small gallery in its storefront to display art made by area high school students.

Each school’s artwork will remain on display for roughly two months, and in addition to showcasing local young artists, the exhibit will enable art enthusiasts to purchase for $20 a T-shirt with the artwork featured on it.

All proceeds will be given to the artist, and Paradiso would like to begin teaching the artists how to use the equipment, like an apprenticeship, so that they are able to gain valuable skills for beyond high school.

“I think they need to be uplifted. I think they need to understand that their art is appreciated,” Paradiso said. “It could lead to a job to get them through college. It could lead to them owning their own business. It could lead to them starting their own gallery. It could lead to them having their own brand.

“A lot of times I just think it takes that one idea or one spark or that one person going, ‘Dude, this is awesome,’” she added.

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