Printer Darlene Johnson: not afraid to learn new things — Focus 

Darlene Johnson pretty much started her career at age 6, helping her parents run the family business, Downtown Printing in Nampa. Though she tried working in other professions as a young woman, and then tried working for someone else in the printing field, she didn’t find satisfaction until she opened her own shop, Darlene’s Printing & Copy Center, in downtown Nampa 15 years ago.

She was able to start Darlene’s Printing with a small business loan from KeyBank geared toward women and minorities. Her staff consisted of herself and one other person, working in a location across the street from her current site at 1224 2nd St. S. Now, her staff has grown to nine people, and the company serves more than 25 major corporate customers.
So, what’s she been up to since the economy tanked? Like so many others, she’s been getting by – and getting philosophical about it.
“We’ve diversified, and we should have been doing that anyway. We had put too much stock in one industry. We got comfortable with the economy going the way it was. We didn’t have to work as hard,” Johnson said.
Now, she’s learning new things and making new partners.
According to Johnson, her top 25 clients are 80 percent of her business, and she has had three of them significantly decrease their printing needs. For instance, she said, “the car dealers are not selling cars, so they’re not needing printing.”
She’s expanding into promotional products, direct mailing, signage and posters. She’s also attending other industries’ trade shows; she’s planning a trip to Wyoming for a meat-packing trade show and would like to attend a medical industry event as well.
“We’re getting very creative,” she said, and so far, it’s working. She hasn’t had to lay anybody off and just bought a Xerox 700 digital color press she believes will make printing more cost efficient for her and, by extension, her customers.
She expects to come out stronger in the end and has been fiscally conservative to the point she can ride things out for a while. “I have a strong belief in putting one step forward and staying positive,” she said.
Her commitment to clients, employees and community is as important to her success as a business contract. Customers are friends, she said, and workers are family. Staff evolution over the years has left her with workers she trusts enough to commit the business to while she travels. Decorum is important. “I have zero tolerance for bad behavior,” she said.
She works with, not against, her competition: “I don’t like chaos. I choose not to be a part of it.”
She has been married for 26 years and has two sons, but doesn’t feel her children will take up the printing business. She intends to stay with it herself well into the future. “I will run the business until it’s no longer fun,” she said.

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