When family owned Daniels Printing in Boston, MA, was sold in 1999 during a spate of industry consolidation, Grover Daniels’ non-compete gave him five years to figure out what, if anything, he wanted to do next in the printing industry. When the non-compete expired, this fourth-generation printer and former owner of an $80 million commercial printing company bought a string of Boston copy shops and, with his brother Adam and some other Daniels Printing alumni, started a major upgrade operation.

At the time, Copy Cop was a 15 location operation using mostly analog copying equipment. There was a central production facility with one early model Xerox iGen3, and a handful of small offset presses.

“It was a fairly traditional print and copy infrastructure that had grown wonderfully over a number of years and then hit the end of its useful life,” says Daniels. “We were successful in bringing them into the next generation.”

One obvious necessity was upgrading to digital equipment. “One of the first things I did was close the press room,” says Daniels. “And we got rid of 95% of the analog equipment. We started to focus on delivering a digital product that was going to be beneficial to the customers and have enough legs in it that any decision we made, we could live with five or 10 years down the road.

“We had an iGen3, so we went out to see what was competing with it. We went to HP and to NexPress and we were even looking at Canon,” Daniels remembers. “What we found through that process was that the cost of acquiring that type of equipment was so high that it wasn’t going to be beneficial to the turnaround of the company. We didn’t think there was enough benefit in the ROI to spend that kind of money, so we went smaller. Instead of getting one big device, we put smaller devices in the stores. We moved production capability back into the stores with Toshibas and Konicas.”

Another move was to trim and streamline the retail operations. “We closed several locations,” says Daniels. “We closed all six Boston financial district locations because that area was just saturated. Outside that area we closed another two, so that leaves us with seven retail Copy Cop locations.”

The remaining retail locations got a spruced-up look to go with their new digital capabilities. Locations were transformed into studio-like spaces with high counters, stools, and workstations, along with personal computer workstations on tables.

Today, all Copy Cop “studios” operate toner-based digital equipment including Konica Minolta bizhub PRO C500s for color, HP 5500s for wide-format, and Toshiba e-STUDIO models for monochrome. The company has also recently added two Konica Minolta C6500s.