History of Advance Reprographics
By Ed Avis
Since today’s reprographics industry was built on the foundation laid by diazo printing, it is appropriate that sniffing ammonia is one of Larry Kosta’s first recollections of his parents’ blueprint business, Advance Blueprint in San Diego.
“My earliest memory is hanging around out back where the ammonia was stored,” says Kosta, who is now vice president and general manager of the firm, today called Advance Reprographics. “I remember taking the lid off the jug once and waking up on the floor!”
Kosta’s father, Larry Kosta Sr., founded Advance together with his wife Deanna in 1963. Prior to launching his company, the senior Kosta was a motorcycle delivery driver for San Diego Blueprint. He learned that his employer was selling a used blueprint machine, and he decided it was time for him to open his own firm. However, the owner wouldn’t sell the machine to him – presumably fearing the competition – so Kosta asked a friend to buy it for him. The trick worked.
Kosta and a partner rented space in a building beside a post office, installed the blueprint machine, and Advance Blueprint was born.
Piles of Trimmings
Larry’s sister Janet Kosta, who is now the managing partner of the company, also has early memories of fun in the back room.
“We had an employee who would sit behind the blueprint machine and trim each print and push the scraps into a bin,” Janet remembers. “That bin was a great place for a kid to play in!”
Sometimes, though, the kids did more than have fun.
“This was before there were automatic collators, so our parents would lay out stacks of each page of a set and we would build the book by picking up one sheet at a time,” Larry says. “I’m sure we protested, but we helped out as long as we could take it.”
In 1972 business was going well enough that the Kostas built their own building a few blocks from the original location. They included a drive-through so customers could conveniently drop off jobs.
“The drive-through was also for dispatching,” says Janet, who joined the company full-time when she finished high school in 1980. “The delivery driver could pull up to the window and off he went.”
Motorcycle Culture
For the first two decades of its existence, Advance Blueprint delivered prints on motorcycles.
“I think we had a half dozen motorcycles at one point,” says Larry, who became a motorcycle delivery person in 1972. “My mom informed me the day I turned 15 and a half that I was legally allowed to ride motorcycles, and she expected me to come to work that afternoon at 1:30.”
He enjoyed the job. “We got paid to ride the motorcycles for deliveries, but we also used to terrorize the drive-in theater next door – we’d ride through it and do wheelies on the humps. The owner finally gave us free tickets if we’d stop doing that!”
The company used the motorcycles for delivery until the little Geo Metro cars came onto the market in the 1980s. They got as good mileage as a motorcycle, and could hold more stuff.
Larry’s love of motorcycle riding extended well beyond his delivery work, however. He raced motorcycles in his free time, and after placing third in a national event, he was invited to join the British Speedway League, an international motorcycle racing organization in England.
“When I got the offer to go to England I was 20 and had no wife or kids, so I was gone,” he remembers. “That was a real experience. The competition was heavy there – they came from all over the world. My ranking when I left was 50th out of 300.”
Plain Paper, Color Printing
Advance Repro's Current Building
When Larry returned to San Diego after two years in England, the company was beginning the transition to plain paper. They had large-format plain paper copiers from Shacoh and Xerox, and by the late ‘90s they were operating four Océ 9800s.
“We hung onto our blueprint machines as long as possible, but ammonia was becoming a real issue in California by then,” Larry says. Advance gave up its last diazo machine in 2003, around the same time they moved into their current location, which is four times as large as their previous location.
By that time color printing was also a growing part of the business. The Kostas had installed a Canon color copier in the 1980s; color copies sold for $1.49 for the first page at that time. About a decade later they jumped into large-format color with an Encad inkjet printer. Architectural renderings were a big part of the work they did on the Encad.
Advance had two designers on staff to help customers prepare their color files. “A lot of people were designing in Photoshop, but it wasn’t print ready,” Larry remembers. “We had to tell them the harsh reality that what they saw on their computer screen was not what it would look like on the printer.”
When the recession hammered the reprographics industry in the late 2000s, Advance doubled down on color work.
“We’re big believers in ‘If you build it, they will come,’” Janet says. “So we brought in more capability, and added some HP printers. Eventually we started seeing more real estate clients, point of sale graphics, retailers.”
About a year and a half ago Advance took another leap ahead by installing an Océ Arizona flatbed printer and a contour cutter.
“We’ve never been so happy,” Larry says. “It was hard for me to get my head around the idea that a 200k machine was going to be better for us, but it’s been great.”
Adds Janet: “It’s gotten us into more materials, like metals, and we can do more artsy projects. We’ve had a lot of fun with it.”
The Future
Larry Sr. and Deanna have long since retired, so Janet and Larry along with their sister Susan run the business today. But the next step is uncertain. No one in the next generation seems likely to take over, so Janet and Larry are considering other options for the inevitable transition, including employee ownership.
“We really don’t know what our future is,” Larry says. “But we’re in no hurry.”