Letterhead Press Inc. (LPI), a New Berlin-based firm that specializes in foil stamping, embossing, die-cutting, holograms, point-of-purchase displays and custom design of printed materials, has acquired selected assets of Welsh Bindery, a printing company also located in New Berlin that closed its doors in December.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The transaction did not include real estate because Welsh Bindery leased the space it formerly occupied.
LPI is located at 16800 Ryerson Road. Welsh Bindery was located across the street, which has made moving its equipment easy, said Chandler Young, vice president of sales and marketing at LPI.
"We purchased about 90 percent of their equipment," Young said. "They’re just rolling things across the street."
The equipment should be running by March, said Michael Graf, president of LPI.
LPI has hired about 12 of Welsh Bindery’s former employees, as well as John and Jack Welsh, the company’s former owners. John Welsh has been named a sales executive at LPI, and Jack Welsh has been named a project manager.
Welsh Bindery filed for receivership in the summer of 2007. Most of its employees were laid off at the time.
The company specialized in high-speed folding, stitching and perfect binding of books and catalogs, as well as highly specialized sorting, ink jet addressing and high-speed in-line mailing – capabilities that LPI did not have previously. Welsh Bindery’s clients included large printers such as Quad/Graphics, Young said. While LPI works with many of those clients already, the added capabilities will give the company a deeper relationship with those clients.
"It’s a natural progression of what we were already doing," he said. "It’s exciting."