This month, Usherwood Office Technologies hosted an open house celebrating their 37^th year in business.  Located in downtown Syracuse NY, the old industrial building they call home has seen quite a transformation over the years.

I arrived at the end of the day, although the event ran from 10 AM to 7 PM.  Owner Lou Usherwood gave me a personal tour.  Lou told me they had about 120 customers come through – the most ever for them at a customer event like this.

Usherwood is a family business with offices in all over NY state.  Their doors opened in 1976 when owner Charles Usherwood, Lou’s father, started selling cash registers in calculators out of their home in Oswego NY.  Now 80, Charles is now retired but he was on hand yesterday and he’s still a charmer.  As Lou said, “nobody ever met him who didn’t like him.

He still keeps up with the industry and he made my day when he told me how much he loves our newsletter and that he “reads it on the email every week.”  Later in 1976 they opened their first office in Oswego.

Usherwood has grown almost every year since 1976 and is now about a $20 million dealership.  They have spent the last year or so remodeling their facility and it looks great.  The show room has received a huge face-lift and my favorite part is the fully functioning production print center they now have on premises.

Usherwood has a great balance of partners that makes them about as formidable a vendor in the production space as anyone.  Canon and Océ high volume devices, online bookletmakers and finishers and EFI’s Digital StoreFront (DSF) provide Usherwood customers with wide format, production hardware, Prism workflow software and much more.

Their fully functioning print shop has significant advantages.  First, instead of customers visiting to see a demonstration of the products, they get to see them in action, running real jobs – key operators taking submitted print jobs, running them on the hardware.  How cool is that?  Taking things a step further, Usherwood can offer customers overflow print capability and a way to get their print jobs done in situations where their device might be down or in instances where they just don’t have the bandwidth to complete the jobs in-house.  Very few dealers can offer anything like this and it was very impressive.

After my tour and some socializing, Lou addressed his staff as by about 7 PM, the customers had left.  It was a real family vibe that reminded me a lot of the dealership I started with in the DC market in the 90s.  Lou brought his dad up in front of everyone and thanked him for giving him the tools he needed to get where he is today.  It was a great emotional, touching moment.  He also retired a jersey of an employee that recently passed away after retirement (they have a wall of retired jerseys of past superstar employees).  Lou then congratulated one of his new hires that closed her first order that day at the event.  Everyone had smiles on their faces.

The event was nicely set up, well attended and they even closed some business.  Great job Usherwood, you’re definitely on my A-list and you’re definitely one of the first vendors I recommend to my local friends that are looking for copiers, printers, etc.