Company Profile
Mirror Image Inc.
Owner: Rick Roth
Type of business: Screen printing
Location: 190 Exchange St., Pawtucket
Employees: 40
Year established: 1989
Annual sales: $3 million
Innovation is key to success as foreign competition drives down prices
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
By Emilio DiSpirito IV License Partner | Engel & Völkers Oceanside Leader | The DiSpirito…
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Stacks of T-shirts piled high on tables, Spanish music blasting from a nearby stereo and owner Rick Roth’s flip-flops and pony tail give the screen-printing shop a bohemian feel.
But his commitment to having a union shop, to paying for full health-care benefits for his employees, to importing fair-trade T-shirts, to doing free print jobs for Oxfam or Amnesty International – up to 100 shirts per day – those are what make Roth’s business more than a new-age backwater.
Whatever the combination, it works. For seven years, Roth’s company, Mirror Image Inc., has occupied a 30,000-square-foot mill building next to the Pawtucket Armory. And for seven years, he’s been able to stay in business. He’s now printing about 1.5 million T-shirts a year – a pretty amazing feat in an industry where competitors are constantly popping in and out of business due to cutthroat competition.
Roth credits his company’s success to its quick turnaround and unique printing techniques. In the beginning, Mirror Image specialized in “integration of in-house color separations and our own printing techniques to get really superior results.”
They would separate colors several times and make adjustments during printing to produce exceptionally crisp detail in art prints for museums and galleries – some of which, he notes, won industry awards. “We were one of the first people to ever do that.”
In the past two years, Roth has continued his innovative track, using high-density inks to create special effects, such as the illusion of cellophane tape, or stitching, or metal, wood or leather. Its realistic droplets of condensation, on a bottle of Polish mineral water, won Mirror Image a “Best in Show Golden Image Award” at the Specialty Graphic Imaging Association’s 2003 annual convention.
Roth has branded this part of his business “MonkeyFish Printing.” He says he markets the process mostly as a service to customers who seek contracts for high-volume promotional goods, then turn to Mirror Image to execute the commissions. Examples of end users of the MonkeyFish technique include Absolut Vodka, Dunkin’ Donuts and extreme sports outfitter Gravis Footwear.
Roth is clear about his motives for developing the new printing technique: His business was being hurt by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which lowered barriers to trade, creating a global market that helped drive down prices.
If customers find something 2 cents cheaper, he said, “they’re going down the road.”
The only way he saw of staying in business was to develop a product that could not easily be duplicated. Hence, MonkeyFish.
Roth also is clear about why his company was able to respond to the challenge with innovation: “[Our policies] give people security, so they stay here,” he said. “That’s how you get to be good. People feel secure, and they stay with you.”
Treating people well, in Roth’s book, extends beyond the bread-and-butter issues. When he took 12 employees to a trade show in New Orleans, they ended up printing T-shirts to benefit the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic. Their demonstration of company skills turned into a benefit that raised $35,000 for the nonprofit.
That sort of commitment, not only to his staff but also to the greater good, is important to Roth. His company benefits too, he says, pointing to positive word-of-mouth as one of its most effective forms of marketing. For example, he recently received a contract from a gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts that he believes came based on his being a union shop.
In addition to the company’s 10 promotional-product clients, he said, Mirror Image has direct relationships with about 50 other clients.
But Roth would like to increase his promotional product business from 10 customers to 50, because one promotional-product company will order 400,000 prints per year, he said. And they do the sales and marketing, which takes the pressure off Mirror Image.
The company’s busy present is a far cry from its homestyle beginnings. It started as a joke, with Roth crafting T-shirts for an annual get-together with friends that they called the “Nantucket Spaghetti Festival” – an event that had little to do with Nantucket or spaghetti. He bought a hobby screen-printing kit, did a few experiments – and he was hooked.
As Mirror Image moves forward, Roth said, it will have to keep “lots of irons in the fire” to remain successful. Nearly all of those projects, he said, will involve pushing the envelope a bit.
“When people want something outrageous, they’ll come to us.”
