Garlock Printing expands in Sparks

Garlock Printing and Converting, a printer of film-based flexible packaging that opened a printing facility in west Reno in March, leased an additional 65,088-square feet of warehouse space at 1450 E. Greg St. in Sparks.

Kevin King, chief financial officer for Garlock Printing and Converting, says the new facility will be used to house raw materials and finished goods and likely is the first of several such warehouse facilities for Garlock in the Reno-Sparks area. The company is headquartered at Gardner, Mass.

“In Massachusetts we have in excess of 300,000 square feet of warehousing and printing, and we have every intention of having that footprint in the Reno area,” King says.

Garlock uses state-of-the-art 10-color flexographic presses to make flexible packaging for the food industry using polyethylene, polypropylene and co-extruded films. Growth at the Reno production facility started slower than the company expected, but King says Garlock Printing had 60 employees at years-end at its facility on Woodland Avenue and expects to employ more than 100 by the end of 2015. The company plans to install an additional printing press in late January and have another flexographic press running by the end of 2015.

“We started slow, but we are putting in a fair amount of equipment and hiring lot of people,” King says.

Having a presence on both halves of the country better positions Garlock Printing and Converting to gain market share, King adds. The facility in Reno allows the company to quickly service Western-area customers and alleviates shipping concerns.

“We ship to every state in the country,” he says. “We ship a lot of business to California and everywhere in between, and having an East Coast-West Coast presence allows us to service customers we already have better with quicker lead times and more efficiency in shipping costs. It also allows us to gain more business. The New England area, when you are shipping cross-country, there’s always concerns about being able to hit deadlines. With both facilities it makes it a lot easier to service the whole country.”