135 Year Old Connecticut Printer To Close Down

[Anonymous]

135 Year Old Connecticut Printer To Close Down
September , 2012 The Hartford Courant Finlay Printing in Bloomfield is closing after more than 135 years in operation, according to employees who say they were told of the news late last week.

Barry E. D’Esopo, who worked 14 years as a project manager for Finlay, said in an email to The Courant: "The proud and dedicated people who caused those press cylinders to turn will no longer labor under the red, yellow and blue flag of the company. The whirr of the folders and stitchers has been silenced and the beep-beep-beep of the trucks backing into the docks has ceased."

Executives for the company, which has employed about 55 people, declined comment. Officials at a printer in Manchester said they have been hiring former Finlay employees.

It was not clear Tuesday how many employees remained at the plant.

On Tuesday, the Finlay facility was quiet, with a few dozen vehicles in the parking lot — mostly belonging to workers finishing the last few print jobs, the employees said.

A spokeswoman for the state Department of Labor said Tuesday the agency had not received a notice of layoffs, which is typically required for all plant closings and layoffs of at least 50 workers, although there are many exemptions.

Across the country, printing operations such as Finlay have been struggling with the dual weight of a recession and shifting attitudes toward the printed word. Local companies reacting to the news were sad to see an established name like Finlay go.

"It is a sad day in our industry and our community to lose such a fine company as Finlay Printing," said John Dillon of Dillon Mailing , who has worked with Finlay for more than 20 years. "They have always represented themselves as a first-class, family-run business. They are outstanding people who put the customer first."

A news report from 1994 put the number of employees at the company, then called Finlay Brothers Co., at 150, with annual sales of $22 million.

The employees who spoke with The Courant on Tuesday said Finlay is closing for financial reasons related to a 2008 repurchase of the company.

In 2000, Finlay Brothers was acquired by priNexus, an Atlanta-based printing conglomerate owned by the New York-based private equity firm Harvest Partners.

But after years of priNexus running the company, Kevin Kalagher, who first took ownership in 1994, and his brother Todd Kalagher had second thoughts about the arrangement. They repurchased the company in 2008, said D’Esopo, taking on a sizable amount of debt to do so.

With the recession and wavering strength of the printing industry, the Kalaghers began to have trouble repaying the debt they took to buy back the company, D’Esopo said, and "because of that they needed to make the decision to close the doors."

Many of the workers have found jobs at Allied Printing, a large printing operation in nearby Manchester.

Linda Lewis, a human resources representative at Allied Printing, said that she has received many applications from former Finlay employees in recent days. She said Allied has hired some of the workers.

"There have been quite a lot of printing companies in the past two to three years that have closed their doors," Lewis said. "And there aren’t a lot of places for people to go. We’re able to take people as we need them."

Robert McCann, vice president at Allied, said that the company has been hiring Finlay print operators, and office and sales employees, and that "we hope to be able to do business with some of their accounts."

[Author]

September 13, 2012 at 9:23 AM