We've been writing about Premier Press for a while now. Last week we finally got to stand inside those words.
Laura Mazy, Marketing Director, invited our crew out to Portland, Oregon for The Backstage - Premier's annual end-user event where clients don't just hear about custom promotional products, they personalize and touch them. Mike, Rebecca, Amber, and Nicole made the trip from Atlanta. Worth every mile, and certainly worth trading 95 degrees for genuinely invigorating Portland mornings.
Parking Lot Pop-Up
Premier's parking lot turned into a supplier showcase for the day. Paper, apparel, drinkware, gadgets, blankets, booth after booth of "check out this cool thing." No spec sheets required, just paper and fabric in hand and vendors explaining exactly why one material or product works differently than another.
Pick a Patch, Any Patch
In the middle of it all: a patch bar where we customized our own shirts, socks, and hats on the spot. Pick your item, pick your patch, watch it get pressed. Half the fun was the wait. Clients and vendors ended up shoulder to shoulder, comparing patch choices and trading stories while the press did its work. Every vendor running the bar was happy to talk through the process of good patch placement. It turned a merch giveaway into something much more personal.
Behind the Curtain
The real jaw-dropper was the tour after. Premier's presses are bigger than our entire office. Not a figure of speech, an actual fact we said out loud while standing next to one. The building runs on sound and smell: paper moving through direct mail lines, color and sorting equipment humming, someone hand-stitching a piece a few feet from a wall of retired letterpress plates. Rolls of paper stacked to the ceiling. Kitting assembly mid-build. It's one thing to write "state-of-the-art production facility." It's another to stand in the middle of it.
The Imagination Library
Then there's the Imagination Library, which earns its own section because it earned its own reaction from our creative team. It’s a room, wall to wall and ceiling to ceiling, filled with some of the most impressive influencer kits and brand packaging we've ever seen in person. We could have spent the whole day in this room. For a team that writes about these exact kinds of projects, seeing and touching the boxes and the inserts made the unboxing moments we usually only describe hit differently.
Creatives Finding Creatives
There's something to be said for two creative teams in a room together. Laura was the ultimate host, walking us through Premier's facility and then through Portland itself, well past business hours. Creatives tend to find each other, and good partnerships get better the more time you spend comparing notes in the same space. Our team left loving the visit, loving the client even more, and ready for whatever we build together next.
Why We're Telling You This
At MWC, we don't manage accounts. We build partnerships. The kind where we say "we" about a client's brand because we mean it. That only works if we actually know the business we're working with, not just the brief. Standing in Premier's facility, meeting the teams we Zoom with monthly, did more for that understanding than a round of reference decks ever could. Know the client's world well enough to create for them like an insider, not a vendor filling a word count.
We stuck around a few extra days after, with Laura as an unofficial tour guide and a stay at McMenamins Kennedy School (that deserves its own write-up). Perhaps our next Sribbles post?
But for now: many thanks to Laura and the whole Premier Press team for inviting us. We left with better socks, better sentences, and an even better sense of the brand we get to create for.