If someone asked you what truly made you different, what would you say? Could you even answer that question? Or would you default to many printers’ standard answer—quality, price, and customer service—which, in today’s market, are no longer differentiators at all? Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll continue with the series interviewing printers who can answer the question differently. This week: The Foley Group in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

Founded in 1979 as Foley Graphics, The Foley Group has grown from a commercial print shop into a full-service print, direct mail, packaging, and marketing operation serving businesses and nonprofits across Westchester County and the tri-state area. The company is still family-owned, now in its second generation under Joe Foley III, who has been running the operation long enough to know exactly where his competitors end and where he begins.

We sat down with Joe to find out what truly makes The Foley Group different.

WhatTheyThink: The differentiation question tends to make printers uncomfortable. How do you answer it?

Joe Foley III: Honestly, I think you have to start, not by what you are, but by what you are not. We’re not the cheapest. We’re not trying to be. We can’t use the phrase “great customer service.” Everyone says that.  So what I keep coming back to is that we take the jobs other printers won’t. The complicated ones. The rush jobs. The jobs that have already been turned down somewhere else. When those calls come in, that’s when my team gets energized. The bigger the challenge, the more we lean in. That’s not a marketing line. It’s just how we’re wired.

WTT: That’s a positioning statement, not just a capability. How did you arrive at it?

JF: Experience, mostly. When you’ve been doing this since 1979, you start to see patterns. The clients who find and stay with us are almost always the ones who got burned somewhere else. The job was late. The colors were off. The printer said yes and then couldn’t deliver. So the differentiation isn’t really about what we can do. It’s about what we’re willing to do and how we handle it when things get hard. That’s harder to replicate.

WTT: You mentioned color. That’s an area where you’ve invested in a specific capability.

JF: Yes. Color consistency across substrates is something a lot of printers talk about and fewer actually deliver. We’ve built relationships with production partners that give us access to G7-qualified color workflows. What that means practically is that if a client has packaging, marketing brochures, and direct mail all going out at the same time, everything matches. Run to run, process to process. That’s not a given in this industry, and clients who’ve dealt with color drift across vendors understand immediately why it matters.

WTT: You serve two fairly distinct audiences—businesses and nonprofits. Is that a differentiator or just a description of your client mix?

JF: I’d say it’s a genuine specialty on the nonprofit side. We’ve been working with nonprofits in this area for decades, and there’s a real difference between a printer who takes nonprofit jobs and one who understands how nonprofit campaigns work. The in-home window matters. Postage strategy matters. A year-end appeal that arrives two days after the giving deadline is a campaign that didn’t work, no matter how good the print quality was.

We manage all of that—the list, the segmentation, the mail schedule, the USPS coordination—so the development director doesn’t have to manage multiple vendors to get a campaign out the door. That kind of operational knowledge takes time to build. It’s not something you pick up by adding a mailing machine.

WTT: You also mentioned digital storefronts as something you offer but haven’t historically promoted. Why bring it up now?

JF: Because it solves a real problem for certain clients, and we’ve been underplaying it. We set up branded digital storefronts where a client’s team can reorder approved materials—inserts, forms, packaging components, whatever—without going through a new quoting process every time. The files are already approved. The specs are locked in. There’s inventory tracking so you know what you have before you order more.

For a manufacturer that ships a product with printed inserts or a nonprofit that reorders the same reply envelopes every year, that’s not a small thing. It removes friction, it removes error, and it saves time. We’ve had the capability for a while. We just haven’t talked about it enough.

WTT: Document management is another service that might surprise people who think of you primarily as a printer.

JF: It’s a side of the business most clients don’t know about until they need it. We’ve digitized large volumes of physical documents for clients who needed to reclaim space and secure their records. One client had 50,000 documents we scanned and moved to the cloud. That’s a real operational problem we solved for them. It just didn’t involve a printing press.

WTT: If a print buyer is reading this right now, what’s the one thing you want them to take away about The Foley Group?

JF: That we’re easy to work with, and we don’t disappear when things get complicated. A lot of printers are easy to work with when the job is straightforward. We’re easy to work with when it isn’t. And when you call, you’re going to get me or someone else who knows your account. You’re not going to a nameless, impersonal queue. That’s something we can actually back up, and after 45-plus years in the same market, our clients know it.