Key Considerations for Facility Expansion

Expansions can be challenging. While it’s a positive sign of growth and business health, it can be complicated and come with a host of considerations, including whether it makes sense to physically expand an existing space, find a “white box” opportunity, or make an acquisition. The latter is something Rosemarie Breske Garvey, president of Lombard, Illinois-based Blooming Color, advises other print service providers (PSPs) to consider when looking to expand in a new area.

“Think long and hard about whether you really want to do a white box or whether you want to do an acquisition, because that was a late decision for us,” she explains.

Garvey says Blooming Color had been experiencing growth of 20%-30% every year for the past five years and it became apparent the company needed to physically expand its manufacturing space.

The company’s manufacturing facility was located in a 30,000-sq.-ft. building in the Chicago area, with an additional 20,000-sq.-ft. warehousing facility close by. The question became whether or not Blooming Color should move to a larger facility in the Chicago area to accommodate the company’s growth or look for another option.

Garvey explains that when looking at the cost of moving its fleet of HP Indigo devices, the price of real estate in Chicago, or even the availability of an open space in the metropolitan area that would accommodate Blooming Color’s needs, it didn’t make sense. She took into consideration the possibility of moving farther away from the area, but took the potential impact on employees seriously.

Flexibility in Strategy

At first, Garvey says the plan was to build a “dream” production floor from scratch, starting from a “white box” facility where the team would be able to plan the perfect workflow for efficiency.

“But then you have a revenue gap,” she says. “While you’re building that facility, you’re not producing anything in it. We really started looking at how long it was going to take us to get up and running and it became apparent that doing an acquisition, as opposed to building a dream plant from scratch, was the better way to go.”

The perfect answer came in Louisville, Kentucky.

“I would never have told you that we were buying a company or that we were expanding to another state at the beginning of 2025,” she says. “As we took a look at where our clients need to have work and where there is a gap in the supply chain, we started to identify where our next steps would need to be.”

Blooming Color purchased a 40,000-sq.-ft. printing facility in Louisville in a “friendly transaction” with someone who was looking to divest one of their printing facilities.

Louisville is also the location of the UPS Worldhub, a strategic positioning choice that gives Blooming Color the ability to ship jobs “until two in the morning” and get it to the customers that very same day, Garvey says. Canva, which is one of Blooming Color’s customers, not only needed additional capacity that is now served by the additional manufacturing space, its business model benefits from one-day ground shipping.

“Any time you can cut down on shipping for your client, the better,” Garvey says. “And the end user, they get the product sooner.”

It’s also a benefit for the environment, which is an important piece of Blooming Color’s value proposition.

“If I don’t have to put something on an airplane so that you get it tomorrow and I can simply put it on a local truck and it gets to you via ground service, that’s certainly better for the environment,” she says.

Integrating a New Business

One of the aspects of the expansion Garvey was most focused on was the talent. She explains that since she and Blooming Color CEO Brian Scott are located in Chicago, it was front of mind to understand the labor pool and culture in Louisville.

“How do you find talent?” she asks. “What does the labor pool look like? What are the labor rates? Chicago is certainly different than Kentucky, so it was really important to us to make sure those new folks on our team in Louisville felt valued.”

To assist in the integration, Blooming Color hired a general manager who moved to the Louisville area. Garvey describes him as a “big culture guy,” something that was important to Blooming Color’s strategy for integrating the two locations.

“He’s been a wonderful culture leader for us,” she says. “In addition, we’re fortunate to have some folks who have been with the company for a very long time who are skilled and experienced, so together, they’re growing into this wonderful team that feels like Blooming Color. … People are very much the first priority and also the first challenge.”

Beyond integrating new talent into an existing company culture, there will also be the challenge of integrating new technology when acquiring another business for expansion.

Garvey notes that Blooming Color was a fully digital business, but with the acquisition, it acquired offset technology, which she describes as a “completely different animal.”

“With that has come some pretty massive direct mail because when you buy a company, you’re also buying revenue,” she says. “We do a lot of on-demand book production as well and some of those larger jobs we can now send down to Louisville instead of printing them on the Indigos, so we’re settling into what that mix looks like.”

Garvey says that while the Chicago team is still figuring out the ins and outs of the offset press, the team has some skilled operators in Louisville that manage it well.

“The more we can alleviate the team here and start to load balance between the two facilities, the better it is,” she explains. “It also helps the Louisville team to rise up and grow into a different kind of work and a different pace of work than they might have been used to before.”

Expansion for the Future

Garvey advises that for companies deciding between acquisition and a white box strategy, it’s important to “think long and hard” about what makes the most sense for the business.

“I think if we had gone in looking for an acquisition sooner, we could have been more productive early on rather than getting excited about this dream plan,” she says. “It’s a wonderful exercise in letting go.”

Blooming Color has built a solid foundation for more growth, and while Garvey notes that the company was already in a great position moving into 2026, it’s important to remain flexible to facilitate and encourage further growth.

“We’re fortunate to still be small enough to be nimble,” she says, “but large enough to matter.”