My wife (Becky) and I started Bears Printing & Bindery Inc. in the fall of 1988.We started with nothing but a plan and the most important thing a PO for a printing job. The job was a large set of "Art Work Manuals" for clip art. This was our very first customer Payless Cashways. Later in our career our very first customer almost made us our last customer when in 1998 they went bankrupt.

It was about the same time frame when I met Morrie and became a customer. Up to this time in our business life we had been estimating and writing up job tickets with paper and pen. There were other options available but none were as user friendly as PrintPoint.

Once we put Print Point into the mix we immediately started to realize fast turn around on our quotes, much more consistency with our price, and a smoother work flow. We really like the way the system work from quotes to jobs to invoicing. This has been a huge help to our company. Unfortunately it wasn't good news for a couple of our office employees that was handling the estimating and customer service. We just didn't need the extra staff any more.

We have had quite journey here at Bears Printing. We started with a single color Hamada 15 x 18 and that was it. Any prepress or finishing work all had to be farmed out. Today we have a full pre-press department PC and Mac compatible. We are direct-to-plate. Our press room consists of a one, two, four, and five color presses. From 10 x 13 to 25 x 38 press sheet. Our bindery consists of two programmable cutters, folders, scoring machines and a collator for saddle stitch or corner stitch books. PrintPoint handles it all.

We still run pretty much mean and lean with about 10 employees. In the future we are considering adding the workstation data collection. We're confident that PrintPoint will continue to grow right along with us.

Alex Hinkle

Bears Printing & Bindery
816-421-7079
ahbears@swbell.net