Carlson Craft’s founders, Bill and Betty Carlson, started the company in their family room in Mankato, Minnesota as a part-time business venture in 1948. With little more equipment than a Remington typewriter, the couple mailed out 50 letters to local business firms and individuals to promote the Carlson Letter Service. Very quickly they decided they wanted to be a wholesale supplier of wedding stationery.

“From 1945 I had the “American Dream” of someday having my own business. After investigating several possibilities the idea of a letter shop seemed the most logical one. (The U.S. Dept. of Commerce had numerous plans for returning servicemen to “start a small business” after WWII.) Betty and I had typing and mimeographing experience, so we started a “Part-Time Venture” in our home.” – Bill Carlson

Glen Taylor, then a college student, got one of his first jobs with the company. Taylor loved a challenge, had ideas to make things better, and had the drive to get things done. He worked almost every job at the plant, allowing him to really learn the business. Listening to what his customers wanted, he developed new ways to cut delivery times, improve service, and expand the company’s product offerings.

As Glen looks back,

“It seems obvious now, but others were just printers, while we were also marketers, listening to brides and giving them what they wanted.”

As the Taylor Corporation grew and more women joined the company, it became evident the company had an opportunity to do something few others had done: provide childcare for families employed at Taylor Corporation. The opening of Golden Heart Childcare was a revolutionary business practice and a perfect example of how the company values its employees.

Having served the needs of businesses with custom stamps for some time already, we saw the opportunity to develop our own stamp brand. With the launch of the 2000PLUS® brand, we leveraged our knowledge of stamps into a brand that we owned, allowing us to own the distribution and control the supply chain of component parts and giving us a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

This marks a notable event in our stamp production capabilities as Specialty Products was the first outside vendor licensed by Shachihata to be an Xstamper Manufacturing Partner. We now are a larger producer of Xstamper stamps than even Shachihata.

Since being created as its own business unit back in 1989, Carlson Craft Business Solutions Group (formerly Carlson Craft Commercial) had diversified beyond Stationery and Specialty Products to encompass Presentation Folders (now FolderWorks) and custom Labels (now LabelWorks). In 2008, these four divisions of the Business Solutions Group rebranded under the “Navitor” name.

An earlier acquisition by Navitor of a printing facility in Spokane, WA offered us the opportunity to expand into architectural signage. This printing facility had a small division that created ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant signage for businesses. While Navitor focused on the printing acquisition, Specialty Products took over the signage business and, in 2010, moved the signage team to North Mankato.

In the years since, ADA and architectural signage has grown to be one of our premier product lines and areas of fastest growth.

The acquisition of Standard Register, now Taylor Communications, takes Taylor Corporation over the $2 billion mark.

We embrace challenging customer requests as opportunities to leverage our experience and technology to provide solutions where other suppliers have struggled. Such was the case with our global telecommunications partner. They needed a solution to help better control messaging— ensuring delivery of the right message at the right time, across multiple channels— with a unified brand experience.

Using our integrated ordering technology, individual store locations can log in and order personalized, branded materials on demand when a new promotion rolls out. To support this effort, we re-engineered our internal workflow processes so we could create a new SKU and be in production with a web-to-print order within 4 hours.

In recognition of the innovation and collaboration necessary to make this program successful, the team was awarded the Glen Taylor & Deb Taylor Award for Innovation in 2018.