The company has continued a long, 165-year-old publishing and printing tradition started by Karol Miarka in 1875. It prints books, magazines, catalogues and leaflets. Its owner, Maciej Jańczyk, granted the Lider z powołania (Authentic Leader) title, told us about his work and the publishing market situation.
You are a company with wonderful tradition.
That is true, we foster the tradition started in 1845, when the printing house was founded by Tomasz Nowacki. In 1875, it was taken over by Karol Miarka who initiated the publishing and editorial activity. He printed books and magazines supporting promotion of the Polish culture in the territories of the Austrian Partition. The activities were continued by his son, Karol and Paweł. Karol erected the present seat of the printing house. Those days, that was one of the largest and most modern printing houses. In 1920, under the leadership of Józef Herman, the machines and editorial activity developed rapidly. Following the nationalisation in 1949, the printing house was turned into Plant no. 4 of the Printing Company (Zakłady Graficzne) in Katowice.
My father, Adolf Jańczyk, is a man appreciating the significance of tradition and the role of the Polish printing. He took the printing house over in 1993. It was then that the new chapter in the history of the company in Mikołów, characterised with its dynamic development, started. It was transformed from a plant printing primarily forms into the one printing books and magazines. We have long tradition but at present what counts most is the quality, punctuality and price so those are the areas we try to meet our customers’ expectations most.
How do you facilitate your Company development?
We used European funds. We participated in the project called “Implementation of the Integrated, Eco-friendly and Economic Process of Manufacturing Interactive, Scented, Backlit, Heating Advertising Billboards and the Increased Quality of the Already Manufactured Products by Implementing Orders in the JUST IN TIME System within 5 Days after the Order is Received”. We bought some machines, replacing the old ones with new ones. We must keep up and be competitive.
You provide services also to foreigners. How do you elicit them?
We have printed for export for more than a dozen years. And we looked for customers during fairs, e.g. in Frankfurt. Eight or ten years ago, we printed 30 or 40 different papers and magazines for the Polish market, but now there are much less of them. In Silesia there are scarcely any publishing houses. This is why I reorganised the company and we opened to the Western markets, including German, French and Dutch. The problem is the papers used to be printed in 80 thousand copies and now we often print just 1 or 3 thousand copies.
How did you improve the printing method?
We are a sheet-fed offset printing house. We have cutting-edge machines, highly qualified personnel and reliability. Those are our assets. We specialise in manufacturing medium – and high-run orders from the simplest to the most complicated ones in terms of technology. Our offer is addressed primarily to the publishers of magazines and catalogues, book publishers, advertising and marketing agencies (brochures, leaflets etc.). We implement projects starting from preparing materials for printing, through printing and finishing processes, to transporting to the destination.
You are also a socially responsible company.
We try not to refuse help to local institutions, schools, nursery schools who ask us for it. What counts most, however, is the satisfaction of our customers who receive a high-quality product in a timely fashion.
Beata Sekuła, Anna Szwed
