It has been said that the poster child (as it were) for the commoditization of wide-format printing is banners, and yet Phoenix’s Custom Graphix Signworks is compelling proof that commoditization isn’t the bad thing it’s often made out to be.

“We like doing banners,” said Mladen Mike Mirkovic, founder of Custom Graphix Signworks. “80% of our work is actually banners. It’s like printing money, pretty much. There’s not lot of finishing and they’re easy to ship. It seems like there’s a huge market out there for them.” The upside of commoditization is that there is a high demand for a product. But there is also a downside: “There’s lot of strong competition for banners,” he added. “Staples, Office Max, and Kinkos are into it and it’s hard competing with them.”

Mirkovic was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and when Mirkovic was a child, his family fled the war there, eventually landing in Phoenix, Ariz. In 2002, he launched Custom Graphix with an early specialty being vehicle graphics. “I started with one 24-inch plotter in a little 400-square-foot shop,” he said. “After about six or seven months, I realized there was a whole new area of our business that I could be approaching and that’s basically banners and signs.” Initially relying on his plotter, he began investigating other kinds of printers and purchased a Roland  VersaCAMM SP-540V printer/cutter, the beginning of a long, fruitful relationship with Roland DG. “That’s when got into a little bit more wide-format printing—vehicle wraps, banners. It took off after that.” A year later, he upgraded to a SOLJET Pro III XJ-740 74-inch eco-solvent printer. “And we expanded from there to another location, a 2000-square foot shop right on 19th Avenue in Phoenix, which is a very busy street. And we started growing from there.”