Four years ago, two men stepped into a Coeur dAlene basement, began making phone calls, and launched what has quickly become a sizable digital-printing enterprise in Hayden, Idaho, now with 65 employees and anticipated revenue this year of $10.3 million.


Much more growth is on the immediate horizon for the two-company venture, which includes By Design Publishing Inc. and Digital Print & Mail Inc., says Brandon Lee, one of the companies founders.


He says he and partner Steve Swayne expect work to begin within the next month on a 28,000-square-foot building in Hayden that will nearly triple their companies current space and production capacity. They expect to spend up to $2 million to construct and move into that building. Also, he says theyre close to signing a big magazine-printing contract with a major insurance company that could create an immediate need for them to add another 20 employees.


I never imagined four years ago that Id be a printer, says Lee. And the printing industry is changing fast.


What began as an attempt to encourage potential customers to buy into a new magazine concept that Lee and Swayne were proposing, soon evolved into a four-magazine production company called By Design, with a department geared as well to produce totally customized magazines.


The two men formed Digital Print & Mail in January to handle By Designs exploding printing and mailing needs. Almost immediately, Digital Print & Mail began printing customized post cards, newsletters, calendars, and other special-order printed materials, including promotional eight- to 10-page mini-magazines, to generate more revenue and keep its presses running. It expanded its printing capacity even more last month by installing four new digital printers at a total cost of about $1.4 million, and at that time replaced the digital press it had before.


Were sort of a personalized custom publisher, Lee says. Were not a pure custom publisher, and were not a pure direct mailer. Were somewhere in the middle.


By Designs four regularly printed magazinestitled Home By Design, Life by Design, Your Home and Lifestyle, and a reproduction of Your Home and Lifestyle thats printed in Spanishare customized publications with a marketing twist. Although the interior pages of each magazine, which include recipes, destination tourist information, and themes targeted primarily at either real estate or insurance-industry readers, are the same, the outer pages arent. By Designs customers pay to have their own photographs and promotional information placed on the exterior four pages of each magazine, then normally distribute them free to their own customers and potential customers.


By Designs employees do all of the photography, graphics, writing, and layout for the interior pages of the magazines, and work with its clients to customize the outer pages. Those clients must order at least 50 magazines, and typically provide a mailing list for Digital Print & Mail to distribute copies to.


Lee and Swayne last year built and moved By Design into a 12,000-square-foot office building at 11626 Tracey Road in Hayden and leased in January a 3,500-square-foot warehouse a block north of there to house Digital Print & Mail. But the companies already are out of room.


The 28,000-square-foot structure they plan to begin building shortly will be located just east of By Designs headquarters. It will include about 10,000 square feet of office space and also warehouse space to house 10 to 12 digital printers, each capable of printing up to 1,200 different magazine covers an hour, plus accessory equipment such as binders, folders, cutters, and inserters, Lee says.


The goal is to move into the new building in May, just in time to begin producing magazines for the undisclosed insurance company that By Design is close to signing an agreement with, Lee says. He describes that agreement as almost a done deal, and says that contract would generate orders for an additional 20 million magazine copies a year.


Digital Print & Mail currently prints and distributes about 6 million pieces of mail a year, he says.


Another promising client is a Seattle-based print-and-mail operation thats negotiating with By Design and Digital Print & Mail on a contract to do some of that companys volume, amounting to up to 5 million pieces a year, says Lee.


By Design sends press-ready pages for its largest magazine, the 52-page Home by Design, electronically to Quad Graphics Inc., a large Milwaukee printer. Quad Graphics uses traditional offset printing equipment to print the 48 interior pages that go into every bimonthly Home by Design magazine. By Design and Digital Print & Mail create, then print the four-page covers for that magazine digitally for 3,600 different clients, then ship those pages to Quad Graphics to be bound with the offset pages into the finished magazine and distributed from there.


Lee says Home by Design and two of the companies other magazines, Your Home and Lifestyle and the Spanish version of that same magazine, are targeted at real estate agents and mortgage lenders. He says the companies other magazine, Life by Design, is targeted at insurance agents, financial planners, and small-business owners.


Life by Design, which is published monthly, as are the Your Home and Lifestyle magazines, currently has fewer pages than Home by Design, but could grow quickly if the pending contract with the big insurance company is signed, says Lee. Lawton Printing Inc., of Spokane, currently prints the interior pages for that magazine, plus those for the two Your Home and Lifestyle magazines.


Home By Design magazine, which currently has a circulation of 325,000 copies when its printed six times each year, costs clients between $3.50 and $5 per magazine, including postage. Lee says the price for that publication is higher than for the other three because Home by Design includes more content and more photography than the others. The insurance-related magazine, Life by Design, costs about $2.50 or less per copy, including mailing, and copies of the smaller two magazines cost $1.50 apiece or less.


In addition to recipes and articles about tourist destinations, the primary text in each magazine focuses on different themes for each issue. For the Home by Design magazine, that theme might be about living rooms, kitchens, or bedrooms, and for Life by Design, the theme might focus on culture, adventure, careers, or hobbies, Lee says.


Custom magazines, where clients select themes for interior pages of publications as well as provide information for the promotional, outside pages, are another fast-evolving part of the business.


Last week, Digital Print & Mail shipped a custom, 28-page magazine to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, in San Francisco, that By Design had created and had printed. The outer pages promoted that hotel and the inner pages provided a scenic tour of San Francisco. Lee says talks already are under way with other Ritz-Carlton hotels, and By Design and Digital Print & Mail are expanding into what they think will become a lucrative hotel market.


In an effort to keep its most recently acquired printing equipment busy, the companies are setting up multiple Web sites online where clients can design anything from post cards to small magazines, do their own spell checking, submit orders, and, if the order is for less than 1,000 pieces and more than 100 pieces, be guaranteed that orders received before 10 a.m. will be sent out by next-day air delivery.


Contact Rocky Wilson at (509) 344-1264 or via e-mail at rockyw@spokanejournal.com.