June 25, 2007
Getting something from nothing
By Adam Smartschan
Clinton's Dunn and Co. just keeps on turning junk into success
David Dunn, founder of Dunn and Co. in Clinton
David Dunn holds the book - what's there of it, at least - the way you hold a brand new, prized piece of gadgetry.
The hardcover edition of "One Party Country," by Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, only weighs a few ounces, but Dunn supports it carefully, both hands in front of him. It's an accommodating, take-a-look-at-this pose, the kind struck by those with all sorts of pride in what they hold.
The cover price for the book, which purports to outline "The Republican plan for dominance in the 21st century," is $25.95 - not cheap, but probably not worth the care Dunn takes with it. And $25.95 is the going rate for a new perfect copy of the book, and not the decidedly imperfect one the mop-topped entrepreneur presents.
Basically, the book is junk. Worthless.
Dunn doesn't mind one bit.
After all, his company's Central Massachusetts success story is all about creating value out of, essentially, thin air. At Dunn and Co., it's trash to treasure, every day - leading to about $7 million annually in revenues.
The book doctors
In 18 years working for book printing companies, Dunn noticed something: big print shops constantly lost business because they wouldn't (or couldn't) fulfill specialty requests. Tiny things - a customer wanting plastic wrap on his volumes, a strange cut of paper - forced his shop to turn down jobs.
Sick of it, he founded Dunn and Co. in a barn in 1976, concentrating in adding specialty touches to major publishers' work.
The business grew to 18 employees before the early 1980s economic drop-off forced it down to three. Desperate to stay afloat, Dunn took a different approach - fixing mistakes made by big publishing houses, and retooling their unusable, impossible-to-sell overruns.
Dunn and Co. took up the task of turning the surplus into useful inventory. They fixed mistakes by printing new, correct pages, removing the incorrect ones and pasting in the replacements, and turned unsold hardcover copies into higher-margin paperbacks by swapping covers.
The Book Trauma Center was born.
"We allow them (publishers) to resell their asset at a higher value," Dunn said.
Growth and expansion
By 1988, Dunn and Co. had 35 employees, and had grown out of its 20,000-square-foot facility in Clinton. Needing room to grow his business, Dunn bought the current plant - a 280,000-square-foot brick fixer-upper.
After the U.S. Small Business Administration helped save the company from foreclosure when its bank went bankrupt (taking Dunn's loans with it), the expansion was on. Now, Dunn and Co. has 180 employees throughout the massive building, about half of whom are "surgeons" tasked with removing and replacing mistake-laden pages. A pair of $850,000 digital presses allow the company to print custom material for insertion into small runs of textbooks for individual colleges, and workers with X-ACTO knives and polymer adhesives can sub out a million pages a month
And, not surprisingly for a firm dedicated to turning worthless material into marketable commodities, almost everything becomes something. Removed covers of hardback books are turned into paperboard products for the sister Legacy Publishing Group, which makes stationary and gift items.
For David Dunn, nothing just keeps turning into something.
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