Twin City Printing

Flexible 60-year-olds are not easy to come by, whether it’s a person or a business.

That makes North Little Rock’s Twin City Printing an exception.

Founded by Walter Simpson in 1945, Twin City Printing spent the next 50 years mainly printing newspapers. Then, in the mid-1990s, the writing on the wall said newspaper printing would not be enough to keep the company going for another half-century. Larger newspaper printers like The Benton Courier and The Leader of Jacksonville were backing Twin City Printing out of its comfort zone and into a more profitable niche of high-end commercial printing.

Twin City purchased a four-color press in 1994 and a six-color, state-of-the-art press in 2001.

“When we put the new press in, it opened up a high-end market that previously we were touching but couldn’t go out and bang at,” said Mike Simpson, son of the founder. “Since 2003 the revenue we’ve lost from newsprint we’ve more than made up for with commercial printing.”

Revenue has grown from about $2 million in the mid-1990s to more than $5 million last year. Even with the switch to printing pamphlets, booklets, brochures, stationery, envelopes and the like, the company has been able to hold onto some of its long-standing, Mike Simpson said.

“We have some customers that have been with us for 20, 30 years,” he said.

And the company has employees who have been there at least that long. Mike Simpson came on in 1968 and has been joined by a line of other Simpsons including sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, and even great-grandsons among the company’s 43 employees.

At 86 years old, Walter Simpson remains the president and CEO.

The family business prides itself in community work, and contributes to the North Little Rock Boys and Girls Clubs, the American Heart Association, the Central Arkansas Radiation Therapy Institute’s Festival of Trees, and other organizations.

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