Cary Sherburneer: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com, and I’m here with Chuck Gehman, who is VP of Product Management for Online Printer Mimeo. Welcome.
Chuck Gehman: Thank you Cary.
Cary Sherburneer: And so lots happening at Mimeo. You guy have – you’re no longer just one facility; you’ve got new facilities, you’ve got all kinds of new applications. Tell us some of the highlights.
Chuck Gehman: Well, we do have three automated document factories, we call them. We have the flagship in Memphis and we have Newark that opened in September, 2008, and then in May, we opened up another really nice big facility in Hayward, California. We had a sales office in Hayward and now we have a factory out there.
Cary Sherburneer: Oh, that’s great. And so, does everybody do the same thing pretty much? Is it a geographic thing or do you have specialized productions?
Chuck Gehman: They are primarily for the geographic diversity, basically, to deliver it to our customers – deliver product to our customers more quickly. But we do, do different products in different places as our customers demand.
Cary Sherburneer: And what are some of the new products that you’re offering?
Chuck Gehman: Well, you know, we just released about a little under two months ago, a pretty major new user interface for making marketing materials actually. And it’s been very, very well received. It’s part of our new development efforts. We’re now; we’re releasing major new functionality, customer facing functionality, pretty much every month. So our customers are seeing new cool things they can do with Mimeo on a regular basis.
Cary Sherburneer: And you’re doing – you’re in the photo book business too, right?
Chuck Gehman: We have our photo books application for Facebook right now, which is really neat. If you’re on Facebook, check it out. Photobooks.com will take you there also.
Cary Sherburneer: Okay, great.
Check Gehman: Yeah.
Cary Sherburneer: And then is it – when you look at, you know because Mimeo is really a technology company that happens to print. And so what percentage of your people would you say are technology orient, IT or programmers or however you want to categorize it?
Chuck Gehman: Percentage wise, I’m not sure because we’ve been growing so quickly, but there are at least 60 people in the organization who are, I would say, in the tech part of the business; in the software/tech areas.
Cary Sherburneer: That’s great. You know, I don’t remember exactly what year Mimeo was founded, you may know.
Chuck Gehman: 1998.
Cary Sherburneer: 1998, so probably 1997 I remember visiting with the three founders; Jeff Stewart, David Uyttendaele and John Delbridge.
Chuck Gehman: That’s right.
Cary Sherburneer: Yes.
Chuck Gehman: Good memory
Cary Sherburneer: And they were going to call it Easy Copy back then.
Chuck Gehman: That’s right. Yes.
Cary Sherburneer: And when they came up with the name Mimeo, I’m like – what? And Jeff Stewart, of course he’s a little younger than I am, he said, “Well, you know, for people of a certain age, it’ll be a nostalgic term. And for younger people it’ll be just a cool term.” And I’m like, “well, I guess that puts me in my category.” I’m of a certain age.
Chuck Gehman: We actually have one of Thomas Edison’s original Mimeograph machines in our lobby in Memphis, which is kind of cool.
Cary Sherburneer: That’s great.
Chuck Gehman: And that is for the people who come to work for us, again, people who don’t have any idea what Mimeo means. And it honestly, I would say, many, many of our customers have no idea what it means these days.
Cary Sherburneer: That’s great.
Chuck Gehman: So, yeah.
Cary Sherburneer: Well thank you very much for sharing with us.
Chuck Gehman: Thanks Cary.
