I Rebuilt Ashwood, Inc.: My Old Print Shop on the Corner in Menasha
Apparently I can’t leave an old company alone. Earlier today it was PowerNet; tonight it’s the print shop.
Back in 2003 I started a little printing, design and marketing company in Menasha called Ashwood, Inc. We set up in the same stone corner building where PowerNet had been a few years earlier: 542 3rd Street, wrapping around to 304 Appleton. Blue steel roof, yellow signs in every window. Our tagline was “Visual Communications Provider,” which was a fancy way of saying we didn’t really sell printing so much as we helped people figure out what they actually needed.
We ran an A.B. Dick offset press, a couple of color copiers, a bindery and a mailing operation, all under one roof: business cards, brochures, bulk mail, and our mail-order line, Amazing Postcards. Every job went out under the cheerfully overconfident 300% Guarantee: not happy, we rerun it; still not happy, we rerun it and hand you a hundred bucks; unhappy a third time, take it to any printer you like and we’ll pay. We meant it, too.
What I remember isn’t the equipment, though. It’s the people. Becky out front in her Ashwood polo. Karen at the desk, running the orders. My brother Andy, holding court by the Canon. And the shop dog, Akiva, who handled quality control from inside a U.S. Postal Service tub on the hand truck, and once spent an afternoon “testing” whether a Nokia clipped to his harness would survive him. (It did. Barely scratched.)
By 2005 I’d taken the hosting offline and Ashwood quietly wound down. No big finish. It just faded, the way small shops do.
And then, like PowerNet, it was gone… until I went looking on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and found 823 pages of the old site still sitting there. So I rebuilt it: the 2003 website you can actually click around in, the sales letters, the Amazing Postcards pitch, all of it. And this time a box of old photographs turned up, which gave back what the archive never could: the place itself. The presses, the storefront, the crew, Akiva, even a couple of grainy old videos.
It’s a small, very mid-2000s story about a corner print shop, the people who ran it, and one very patient dog. I’m glad it’s not lost.
→ Step inside Ashwood, Inc.: jamiedolan.com/ashwoodinc.com
(And once again, thank you to the Internet Archive. None of this survives without them.)
This is part of Nostalgia, my collection of the old things I have built, lost, and rebuilt.
