Keeping the presses running
Broudy has printed for 60 years, even with shift to electronic communications
As companies in the early 1990s began to shed thick, glossy annual reports in favor of yearly summaries printed on recycled paper or posted to the web, Adrienne Mallet got nervous.
For decades, the full-color reports filled with photos and financial tables were a mainstay of her family’s business, Broudy Printing.
“Clients used to spend fortunes to make magnificent annual reports,” Mrs. Mallet said. “When the internet came, that’s the first impact we saw.”
Despite losing those hefty contracts, Broudy has kept its presses running with catalogs, brochures, magazines, folders, calendars and other print materials for businesses, universities and other organizations.
Now the East Liberty firm is navigating another industry transition as customers demand quick turnaround made possible with digital printing, direct fulfillment and web-to-print orders.
Mrs. Mallet’s son, Matthew, 38, has overseen Broudy’s expansion into those tech-driven operations since 2006 when he took over sales and marketing.
“We used to be branded as a high-end, annual reports printer,” said Matthew Mallet. “So we’ve had to work really hard to get the word out that Broudy is not just for annual reports. We’ve had to reinvent ourselves.”
He became president in 2007, but his mother and father, Herbert Mallet, still play key roles at the business that Herbert’s father founded 60 years ago.
Herbert Mallet, 71, ran the business for decades and still helps oversee production on four offset presses. During an interview in Broudy’s conference room, he twice excused himself to check on orders going out in delivery trucks.
“I don’t consider this work,” he said. “I’m here to help Matthew.”
Mrs. Mallet, 69, joined the company when Matthew was in middle school and became head of human resources.
On a walk through the plant, she greets each employee, notes the year they joined Broudy and chats them up about their families. Some have been around “since before Matthew was born,” she said.
Many stay because Broudy offers a company-funded pension, profit-sharing and an optional 401(k) plan.
There are 36 full-timers and about a dozen part-timers — many of them company retirees — who come in when things get extra busy.
The nonunion shop operates one shift, five days a week, and it books additional press runs on Saturdays and evenings when they face tight deadlines.
“That’s part of our culture,” Matthew Mallet said. “We don’t send [workers] home when we’re slow, so we expect them to stick around when we’re busy.”
Matthew Mallet, his parents and his sister, a preschool teacher, are Broudy’s only shareholders and don’t disclose sales.
‘I sure hope you don’t lose this’
Founder Jerome Mallet had been working at another family business and left there when he wasn’t made partner. In 1959, he indulged a lifelong passion for printing by acquiring a tiny firm that produced bank-by-mail forms.
Herbert Mallet said his father paid Dorothy Broudy $5,000 for the shop and a patent on the forms, but kept her name on the business.
Herbert Mallet worked there as a teen, graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in printing management, and headed to another printer in Chicago where he handled two clients: Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Walgreens.
“That’s where I learned the business,” he said.
He returned to Pittsburgh in the early 1970s with Adrienne, a Chicago native who was then a schoolteacher.
He wanted to grow Broudy’s capabilities from forms, letterheads, envelopes and flyers to magazines and bigger projects. To do that, it needed a full-color press.
“It cost $1.2 million, and we had about $1,200,” Herbert Mallet said. “So my father put up $100,000 in life insurance, and my mother said, ‘I sure hope you don’t lose this.’”
To expand beyond a small space it was renting from Stagno’s Bakery on Auburn Street, Jerome Mallet approached half a dozen homeowners.
“We bought them new houses in Stanton Heights, Morningside and Penn Hills and hired a mover to move them,” said Herbert Mallet. “There was never any negotiating. They trusted my dad.” Jerome Mallet died in 1995. With each house acquired, the company expanded, and it now occupies most of the block. “We’re not laid out in a lean manufacturing format,” Matthew Mallet said.
But he doesn’t plan to move to more efficient space in the suburbs. “Most of our clients are in the city, and we like being centrally located,” he said.
Like his father, Matthew Mallet worked at Broudy while he was growing up and got experience elsewhere. He earned degrees in economics and political science from the University of Pennsylvania, then joined a large printer in northern New Jersey.
“It was really my graduate school,” he said. “I knew not to come right back and get in the family business.”
He also spent a year in Los Angeles in sales for ADP where, “I learned to cold-call and accept rejection,” he said.
Bumps along the way
Broudy has faced crises that could have closed it.
Employees were charged with embezzlement a couple of times. Once, a costly press the company bought in Germany was destroyed while it was being shipped across the Atlantic Ocean.
Working with family can result in “tiffs and disagreements,” Herbert Mallet said.
Mrs. Mallet and her son clashed on a recent Sunday about a business issue.
When Matthew Mallet showed up at work the next day, “he handled it the way I had suggested and told me I was right,” she said. “It was an experience thing. I had been through it 20 times before, and he hadn’t.”
The owners often eat lunch with employees at cafeteria-style tables in the plant. Herbert Mallet’s mother used to show up there to share fresh tomatoes and corn from a farmers market.
“I don’t go to the Duquesne Club; I don’t drive fancy cars,” Herbert Mallet said.
“We have been called stealth,” Mrs. Mallet said. “We’ve grown by word of mouth. There’s no advertising.”
Customers include PPG, Bayer HealthCare, Carnegie Mellon University and Rite Aid.
Broudy still prints some annual reports, including recent ones for Dick’s Sporting Goods, Wesco International and the Richard King Mellon Foundation.
Jobs for nonprofits like Catholic Charities and Shady Side Academy — Matthew Mallet’s alma mater — don’t pay as much as corporations, but he likes having their business as a way to “give back to the community,” he said.
“Whether we’re printing a business card or an annual report, we like to put our heart and soul into it. We like to think someone is going to hold on to it, remember it and cherish it — not throw it on the floor.”