Dallas Business Pivots During Pandemic, Reaches One Year Anniversary

A local Dallas business has successfully pivoted amid the current pandemic and is thrilled to announce an important milestone. Dallas Print Factory (DPF), located in the city’s cultural hub, the Dallas Art District, is celebrating its one-year anniversary. While it wasn’t the first year of business the company anticipated, Dallas Print Factory CEO Thomas McShane says the team’s ability to pivot during these unprecedented times played a major role in reaching 365 days.

“You never expect anything to go wrong when you open a business. You dream and expect it to grow a lot faster than sometimes it does. One thing you never really expect or look at is what a pandemic would do or what a recession would do,” said McShane.  “We’ve sold a ton of PPE items, such as masks, gloves, floor stickers and hand sanitizers. Things that we never thought we’d be selling.”

And through making those changes, DPF was able to assist neighboring frontline workers in need of those products. They’ve built a relationship with a local hospital that has a number of locations around the metroplex, which have been utilizing DPF for a number of their frontline caregivers. The team fulfilled an order of 12,000 masks in two weeks for another customer, and an order of 6,200 stickers in less than a week.

“We did a great promotion online that we ran for Nurse’s Day, a customized tumbler. And again, it just made us feel important in the community at the time and although we played such a small part in that, it was nice to see some of the products going out,” said McShane. “From our prospective, we’ve seen how important it is for our customers to be able to protect their employees and their customers through all of the PPE products that we’ve sold.”

And while they never expected to be providing PPE gear, Promotions Director Jennifer Lopez says it’s what helped them stay afloat. DPF initially saw a lot of activity from surrounding businesses that were also in the Design District.

“They’d see our sign and come in, whereas now, they can’t just do that,” said Lopez. “I think that our saving grace was that we jumped on printing the masks, bandanas, floor stickers, and social distancing signage. Everything kind of took off in a way we didn’t expect.”

DPF is happy to be celebrating its one-year anniversary, but according to McShane, though the team was able to reach this milestone due to their ability to stay flexible, they never changed their priorities from day one.

“No matter what, it’s always about the customer and it’s always about our team,” McShane said. “As long as we keep those two things in mind first, we won’t lose sight of what’s important.”

And while it’s been great to help customers, customers have also helped DPF tremendously.

“As a new business, without our customers’ support, we wouldn’t have been able to make it through. Or we wouldn’t have been able to make it up to this point of what has been a very challenging 2020,” said McShane. “It’s been great to be able to provide customers solutions, but we’re grateful for the amount of business they’ve been able to give us through such a difficult time.”

Local businesses in the Dallas area have also been working together and willing to lend a helping hand.

“I found three new print shops that I’ve never used before, but they’ve been helping us out when we need extra hands for screen printing, embroidery, and making patches,” said Lopez. “They’re also a local business that’s having the same issues so we’ve kind of been piggy packing off of each other.”

McShane stresses the importance for residents to continue supporting as many local businesses as they possibly can during this time, now more than ever as they are the heart of our community. Whether that’s restaurants, gyms, bookstores, boutiques, grocers, and services like print shops– whatever it might be. He says shopping local just keeps everybody’s finger on the pulse a little bit more. The community is suffering with the same issues in the metroplex at the same time. It might not impact you directly, but it might impact a family member or friend.

“The word community comes into play. It’s a mashup of two words – common unity. The people you’re supporting right now, they live in your neighborhood. That’s a house that if they don’t get your support right now, you could see a foreclosure sign on in the next couple of months,” said McShane. “They’re businesses that give back to their communities. They want to support from a philanthropic standpoint, they want to support local charities, they want to be able to support local organizations, but they’re only able to do that when they’re supported by local customer base.”

And in terms of future plans for the Dallas Print Factory, according to McShane, it’s to work with the sales team to continue bringing in new clients, investing time and money in learning new machinery and what the market is providing and offering. Most importantly, it’s to continue working on better understanding the clients to build a strong client base.

“Stability is our biggest focus, given what’s happening in the climate and what’s happened so far this year. We could’ve pivoted in the wrong product, but we’ve been very fortunate that we’ve been bringing the right products,” said McShane. “It’s great for us to think that we’re there or we’re getting there, but we have a long way to go. We’re only one year in what we hope to be a hundred year, two-hundred-year business. The biggest thing for us is to just try to build a solid foundation for us to grow the business pretty rapidly on the back end of COVID-19.”

“It feels kind of surreal. I’m pleasantly surprised, especially during all of this, how well we’ve stayed afloat and that we’ve already been pretty successful,” said Lopez about hitting the one-year mark. “I look forward to seeing our staff grow.”

Source: Dallas Print Factory

The preceding press release was provided by a company unaffiliated with Wide-Format Impressions. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of Wide-Format Impressions.