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A Harpswell couple has opened a printing and marketing business in Brunswick, drawing upon their experience in the big-city advertising world and their ability to complement each other’s skills.
Great Island residents Robin and Mike Medina, co-owners and managers of PrintJet, held a ribbon-cutting ceremony July 8 for their shop at 119 Bath Road, across from the Martin’s Point campus.
PrintJet will produce business cards, blueprints, banners, art prints, labels, posters and passport photos. It will also offer marketing and design, binding, laminating and scanning services.
The couple is confident that their professional skills and immersion in the advertising industry in Boston will help them offer superior printing services and navigate the unpredictable business of starting a business.
As a new business owner, Robin said, “You want to feel like you’re a couple of steps in front of things, but I think it’s typical to feel that you’re maybe a half a step behind. I see that leveling out. I’d like to see more things in place. I think we need more things on the wall. These things take time.”
The Medinas met while working at the Baldwin & Stone advertising agency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the extremely competitive advertising world of the late 1990s.
Robin was in account services, while Mike was an art director. They often worked on the same projects.
“There were actually a handful of love matches from that agency,” Robin said. “It was a small agency and people did work long hours, a work-hard-play-hard kind of thing.”
Advertising was near the end of an era, as “things were transitioning from the print world to the digital world,” she said.
After Baldwin & Stone, Robin handled finance accounts for several companies in Massachusetts before starting a craft business, which got sidelined by the pandemic. Mike continued to work in graphic design as a freelancer.
They moved to Harpswell about a decade ago and have spent a lot of their time rehabilitating the “fixer-upper” they bought.
“We haven’t really taken a vacation since we moved up here, but it feels like a vacation,” Robin said. “We like Harpswell. There’s a vacation vibe. I don’t think it occurred to us for a long time to go out and start a business. We’ve been enjoying our lives and working a little bit.”
More recently, they realized they could fill a need they saw for a local printing and marketing business. “We bring my account management and bookkeeping combined with Mike’s ability to do all the graphic design,” Robin said.
Mike Medina added: “There are a lot of great options we can provide customers. We have a lot of unique skills and we have a lot of great equipment here to elevate everybody’s project.”
The Medinas expect their customers to include the Bowdoin College community, engineers and local business owners. They said their location, between downtown Brunswick and Cook’s Corner, makes them easy to find and access.
Mike said there are notable competitors in Brunswick, however, he has witnessed the need for a quality print shop through his work as a freelance graphic designer for the past decade.
“A professional like an architect or a student or teacher would really value professionals making an important document,” he said.
The Medinas have many years of experience with the printing process from the client’s perspective, Mike said, and they have the knowledge to understand a customer’s needs and fulfill their vision.
“It took a little while to see and to understand that we are qualified and trained to do this,” Mike said. “We’re used to being the ones asking for help. We kind of take for granted that we have the experience and skills. We understood what was missing here. We are able to supply it.”
PrintJet is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday. For more information, go to printjet.me or call 207-607-6089.
