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By mid-1994 almost all Kinko's outlets were open all the time.
Manhattan's five stores filled at night with students and business
people who rubbed shoulders with punk rockers and anarchists
designing, copying, and faxing posters. Each of the five had its own
cat as amascotand dispensed coffee from a machine at no charge.
By 1995 new Kinko's stores were, on average, four times larger than
the ones they replaced. This was due in part to the space needed for
an ever-increasing inventory of high-end service equipment. (The
Xerox 5090 high-speed color-printing machine, for example, nearly
filled an entire room.). The company also installed Kinkonet, a
system enabling companies to send in orders by computer, with
Kinko's distributing the finished product, such as a training manual,
to points all over the United States.
A Kinko's outlet typically offered the following services in 1996: full
and self-service copying, including four-color copies; desktop
publishing, including laser typesetting and printing; onsite
Macintosh and IBM computer rentals; office supplies and stationery;
finishing services such as folding, binding, collating, and stapling;
custom printing services; facsimile transmission; and mailing, pickup, and delivery service. FedEx drop boxes were installed in all
Kinko's locations. Some outlets also offered one-hour photo service
and videoconferencing. Kinko's considered customer service of such
importance that each location was being "mystery shopped" on a
regular basis, with anonymous shoppers grading the store on 29
different points of customer service and store atmosphere.
A New Direction for Kinko's
Even while Kinko's retail niche as a full-service copy shop was
secure, new marketplaces were needed if the company wanted to
continue to grow and prosper, and especially if Orfalea was to take
his company public. During the latter half of the 1990s, Orfalea
began shifting Kinko's marketing strategies and re-organizing its
corporate structure.
His new business plan called for actively soliciting business from
Fortune 500 companies. A newly created outside sales force hit the
ground running, knocking on company doors across the county in an
effort to bring in new corporate accounts.
In order to raise capital for this expanded growth and to keep outlets
outfitted with the latest office technology, Orfalea took a radical
step in 1996: selling a one-third stake in the company to Clayton,
Dubilier & Rice (CD&R), a New York City-leveraged buyout firm, for
$220 million. Up until this time, Orfalea had sole ownership in
approximately 110 outlets and a stake in all others, which in
Chronology
Key Dates:
Additional Details
Private Company
Employees:25,000
561439
Other
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