Diane Romano describes how this visual communications company approaches each client’s challenges with experience—not preconceptions.

In March 2006, The Chicago Art Production Services (CAPS) Group acquired the educational product development, catalog, publication, and premedia operations of Schawk, Inc. for $29 million, making it one of the largest independent graphic arts services providers in the US. Diane Romano, president of Schawk’s New York operation, was chosen to lead the new entity, HudsonYards.

According to Romano, this isn’t the first time the team at HudsonYards had been licensed a new identity. Over the years, the same team (give or take a few members) worked together at Applied Graphics Technologies, which acquired Seven Worldwide in 2000 and became AGT-Seven.

AGT-Seven was rebranded under the Seven Worldwide name in 2004, and in 2005, Seven Worldwide was acquired by Schawk. Shortly thereafter, The CAPS Group bought Schawk’s New York operations as well as related businesses in Illinois, Florida, and Wisconsin. “I like to say we are a one-year-old company with a long history,” said Romano.

Diane Romano, COO

Today, Chicago-based The CAPS Group consists of a number of visual communications companies, including CAPS57, Alchemy, Paragraphs, Superior, CPE, Black Dot, and HudsonYards. HudsonYards, with offices in New York, Nashville, and San Francisco, provides corporate clients, advertising agencies, and publishing companies nationwide with studio, premedia, creative retouching, and asset management and workflow services.

Romano explained that studio services, a growing division of the company, consists of reconfiguring a client’s advertising and/or marketing ideas to fit multiple languages, regions, and forms of media, including brand marketing, collateral, point-of-sale, packaging, presentations, and interactive media.

Premedia services include processing, proofing and distribution of advertising pages, color management to create brand consistency across multiple media, and print management. HudsonYards prints digital, large-format materials for point-of-purchase and trade show displays and offers lithographic printing for marketing collateral, promotional materials, direct mail, and sales kits. Creative retouching involves manipulating photographs and advertisements to make them more appealing and a better representation of the client’s brand and marketing/advertising vision.

Embracing change
In addition to hands-on creative work, HudsonYards helps its long list of blue-chip clients, including Grey Worldwide, JWT, Lancôme, Martha Stewart Living, Hearst Magazines, and Newsweek, with workflow management.

“We study everything our clients do and help them eliminate steps by, for instance, automating certain tasks. For clients who choose automation, we help them get all the technology in place—you can buy all the pieces, but if you can’t integrate them, it doesn’t mean a thing,” said Romano.

Technology has not only streamlined processes, it has blurred the line where the client’s job ends and HudsonYards’ begins, which is why the company provides solutions based on each client’s needs. “Because we are client-focused, we don’t do our job one particular way. We do as much or as little as clients want us to, and that is often based on what a client sees as its core competency. We have to stay flexible to compete,” the COO said.

For instance, Newsweek has been a client of the company, through all the name changes, for more than 30 years. At the beginning of the relationship, more than 50 employees were dedicated to the Newsweek account, but because technology has allowed the client to take on more tasks, only 10 employees focus on the account today. “We sit down with Newsweek periodically to figure out what makes the most sense for them to do and what they should hand off to us. We continually adjust our approach,” said Romano.

A similar example is HudsonYards’ relationship with Coty, the world’s largest fragrance company. In the past, HudsonYards produced and distributed all of Coty’s magazine advertising, but its responsibilities have grown and now include creating design adaptations of each brand’s master campaign to meet the various needs of the company’s media plan. “Sometimes you expand your services, and sometimes you allow the client to do more for themselves,” Romano said.

Branching out
With the new name came a new focus: Hudson-Yards aims to be the best—not the biggest—in the industry. “We have refocused our work force on quality. Everyone is held accountable for what they produce. I’d rather they take extra time to make sure what they’ve done is what the client asked for,” said Romano. “I’d like to achieve zero defects.”

To reach that ambitious goal, the company has invested heavily in technology that frees up creative time. The company is also increasing the size of its studio services department to handle greater client demand and will soon be providing creative execution services for its corporate clients.

In addition to building on its existing print-focused service lines, HudsonYards is dipping its toes in computer-generated graphics, Internet services, and broadcast television advertising. In fact, it is currently doing due diligence for a possible acquisition later this year that will solidify the company’s position in non-print media services.

Although Romano predicts non-print media services to grow rapidly in the next few years, print services won’t be lagging far behind. “There is a synergy between print and non-print media. The retouching work we do for a print campaign is very similar to the retouching work for a TV commercial—not to mention special effects. These two segments will certainly grow hand in hand,” Romano concluded.