Not Just ‘Makin’ Copies,’ APC Is Making Memories And Moving Projects

By John Voket

Rob Schneider’s Richmeister from the old Saturday Night Live skit was fond of hanging out at his desk watching everybody else in the office “makin’ copies.” But you won’t find any of the employees at Newtown’s newest copy center sitting around with nothing better to do.

The recent soft opening of APC Copy Center on Simm Lane has not gone unnoticed by dozens of new customers who have wandered in during the past couple of weeks, although the company’s launch has occurred with little fanfare or advertising.

While sitting down earlier this week with The Bee, APC’s owner and president Roy Scheunemann was already talking about adding more new equipment to accommodate the expected influx as more people learn about his newest venture.

Mr Scheunemann is no stranger to a niche of local and national clients who have been coming to him since 1993 to get economically priced specialty paper, and more recently, media and high quality architectural prints and reproductions. But after hearing dozens, possibly hundreds, of customers asking him for unrelated repro work — everything from business cards to flyers to newsletters to enlarged charts and art prints — the owner of Auros Paper Company decided it was time to diversify.

“The business became reestablished pretty quickly after I moved from Middletown to Newtown in 1997, and I had my hands full shipping paper for the engineering and reproduction industries,” Mr Scheunemann recalled. “But some of my clients started asking me to provide them with specialized reproduction services along with the paper, so I purchased a commercial black and white scanner and printer, and expanded in 2000 to providing prints and charts for a select group of engineers and architects in the tri-state area.”

 

A World-Class Team

Already employing a capable, yet lean staff including office manager Jennifer Brown and sales/shipping manager John Blaze to handle all of the retail and wholesale paper and professional repro business he was already doing, Mr Scheunemann decided to bring on a friend of his son’s who displayed a keen talent for working on and with computers.

The addition of Newtown resident Phillip Lombardo was all that it took to complete the equation and APC Copy Center was in business. Utilizing Mr Lombardo’s left brain skills for IT and systems minutia and his right brain talents for processing and design, Mr Scheunemann had all the necessary players in place to launch a world-class retail copy center right out of Auros’ local headquarters adjacent to Windowland in the South Main Street office complex.

Now all he needed was to acquire an expanded arsenal of hardware, software, and peripherals. So Mr Scheunemann began shopping for the necessary equipment to meet the demands of his existing customers, as well as the thousands of potential new customers he was hoping to attract as part of his new business’ strategic plan.

“We already upgraded to a larger capacity black and white output/scanner from the original one we got in 2000,” Mr Scheunemann said. “So we went out and added a similar full color machine that can output virtually any image or graphic in full-color, 36 inches wide with virtually no length limitation except the size of the roll of paper we feed into it.”

In addition, Mr Lombardo assisted in the acquisition of a commercial Canon color reproduction printer, and a full line of networked work stations supporting state-of-the-art software packages for the printing industry including the Adobe Creative Suite of Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and Acrobat. In addition, the company can accommodate any size of scanned original documents or electronic files delivered on disc or emailed that are developed in the Quark page design program or any AutoCAD system.

“We can scan in and archive anything for any customer,” Mr Lombardo said. “So if they ever need to review original work, edit, adjust, or reissue existing projects, we can have it done and on the way to delivery with the click of a mouse, as long as it’s been saved in our system.”

Despite the fact that Auros and APC are already busy handling expanded work orders from existing customers, they are pleased to be meeting new clients who learned about the new copy center from engineering and architect industry referrals.

 

Expanding Customer Bases

“We’ve been doing a ton of work for local real estate offices and law firms,” Mr Scheunemann said. “But now we want to start partnering with small or independent business people and local small businesses that need stuff like business cards, newsletters, catalogs, flyers, and signs.”

One of the lesser-known but popular items APC can provide is vividly colored poster-sized reproductions of images directly off customers digital cameras or data discs. They can also scan and enhance or restore existing hard copy photos, graphics or posters to their original, reduced or enlarged sizes.

“We have a lot of customers who are in the art field, and they get poster prints of their original work,” Mr Lombardo said.

“And if you have a picture of your son from a sporting event, or your granddaughter from her ballet recital, just bring in the print or the camera and we’ll print out an 8 by 10 or up to a 36-inch-wide color poster for you in just an hour or two, or while you wait,” Mr Scheunemann added.

The APC Copy Center staff prides itself on doing almost all of its services in-house, but the company also has an exclusive network of craftspeople and partners standing ready to handle a few specialty tasks like framing, certain types of binding, advanced offset printing, and certain commercial-level graphic and logo design work.

When it comes to volume, the APC crew is not afraid of pushing the dial to 11, handling reprographic jobs including a recent project for the renovation team at Sharon Hospital who had to turn around 25 sets of 24-by-36-inch architectural, mechanical, and structural print packages in just 48 hours.

“Each of the 25 presentation packages had 232 pages of prints,” Mr Lombardo said. “But we had them finished, collated, bound, and ready to deliver by the morning of the second day.”

Another recent walk-in client rolled in with a large cardboard box filled with all the receipts, invoices, and other items for filing her business’s income tax, and she needed every last scrap of paper copied in just a few hours, Mr Scheunemann said. “It was a unique request, but we were happy to oblige,” he said.

Auros and its APC Copy Center are proud embers of the Newtown and Danbury Chambers of Commerce, as well as members in good standing of the National Federation of Independent Businesses. The company offers a dedicated FTP site to expedite large scale commercial electronic deliveries, and invites requests for quotes in person at its South Main Street offices, by fax at 270-6995, by phone at 270-1409 or by email at aurospaper@aol.com.

New and returning customers can also click on www.aurospaper.com.