Jason Thompson, owner of Rag & Bone Bindery in Pawtucket, has built the business on ingenuity, attention to market trends, and a lot of hard work. Below, some Rag & Bone albums, all handmade.
COMPANY PROFILE
Rag & Bone Bindery
Owners: Jason Thompson and
Ilira Steinman
Type of business: Book bindery
Location: 1088 Main St., Pawtucket
Employees: 11
Year established: 1991
Annual Sales: WND
Jason Thompson and his wife, Ilira Steinman, say the secret to their success is being “scrappy”– which by their definition includes being thrifty and crafty.
It is those qualities, they say, along with the integrity of their products, that have kept their small company, Rag & Bone Bindery, in business for 15 years, making guest books, photo albums, journals, scrapbooks and other items entirely by hand.
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Today, 16 hands (eight people, on the shop’s manufacturing end) make the books in an old jewelry factory in Pawtucket. But the company began with two hands, Thompson’s, which he used to make the first blank-page journals.
Bookbinding attracted him, he said, because “I felt it was both an art and craft, and I wanted to make things.” Though he’s never finished high school, Thompson said, he taught himself how to be a craftsman and businessman.
He was 24 when he started, making journals in his Providence apartment and selling them on College Hill and at Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Mass. Soon, he moved to a live/work space in an artists’ building in South Boston, making and selling a growing number of handmade journals.
In 1993, he developed an original technique for binding journals with ribbon (which he would not divulge). Ribbon-binding was not a new concept, “we just did it better,” Thompson said, and the technique “turned us into a business.”
Thompson started making books and photo albums for Henri Bendel, a high-end department store on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Having outgrown his studio in South Boston, he moved back to Rhode Island with Steinman, then his girlfriend.
At first, they lived and worked in the former Imperial Knife Building in Providence. As the business kept growing, they moved to Blackstone Studios in Pawtucket, then to a space off Allens Avenue in Providence.
In 2002, when that building was torn down for the relocation of Route 195, they bought a 10,000-square-foot building in Pawtucket, using relocation money from the federal government, their savings, and a low-interest loan from the city to purchase and renovate the old mill. Thompson said he did most of the demolition himself, to cut costs. He and his wife have been “scrappy” in other ways, especially when it comes to financing with banks. But, he said, they’ve always paid their bills on time. “Everybody gets paid; if not, we push up on sales.”
The company’s most recent success has come from paying attention to the market.
When photo album sales were dwindling, Thompson came up with a new idea, a digital photo album, which has become Rag & Bone Bindery’s top-selling item since they launched it last year. The new albums have removable pages, on which you can print digital photos. They cost $28 to $38, depending on their size. Barnes & Noble has ordered nearly 5,000 pieces, Thompson said.
Rag & Bone Bindery can make up to 1,000 books per week, he said, but they keep the product line small – currently, 13 products – because fewer items are “easier to pump out.”
Sales have increased since they started selling items from their Web site, he said. And though it is only a small portion of the business (most is wholesale), Thompson hopes to expand the Web-based business because its profit margins are better.
But Thompson said he and his wife and their two children are content for now. The business has transformed into a lifestyle. “It’s about working with great people.”
And the couple recently got approval to renovate the second floor of their building into a residential loft, which is “our dream,” he said.
Thompson is keeping a blog about the renovation, at loftrenovation.blogspot
.com. Again, they’re doing much of the work themselves.
“Where we are is where we need to be,” he said.
