Wallquest

       When you think of a multi million dollar company, you don't think of wallpaper. The average person thinks of Amazon or Apple or any company that is well known and popular. Wallquest is a wall paper company out side of Philadelphia right off the Valley Forge exit on the turnpike. When you first approach this massive warehouse you expect to see just that, a warehouse.  However, when you walk in, you see giant printing presses that are running twenty four seven.  They have a huge storage facility stacked to the ceiling with wall paper that always needs to be stocked and an office building in this warehouse. They run all of their day to day operations from here. Wallquest has twenty four large printing presses that produce high end wall paper that is shipped out globally to businesses and special contractors. They mainly send their product over to China and some European countries. Brain Collins the CEO of Wallquest says he's been to China about twenty times conducting business over there.

Figure 1

Figure 2/ Figure 3 below

        Wall paper has been around since the late 18th century (early 19th century press fig 1) and even though the printing techniques have changed a little with time, the main concept is still the same. First you need to have someone come up with a design and draw it to perfection. Color is then added the way they think would look best on a wall. Once that is done, they take it to the rolling station. A machine is used to carve a design into the roller, (a roller is a metal tool that prints the ink onto the paper). Next,  the roller is transferred to the printer and they test run it.  This is done about ten times to see if the pattern looks good and is consistent on the paper, if it is not consistent on the paper it will not match when you put it on the wall. After they check it and it passes the quality tests, they start printing (yellow press fig 3) it.  They print "thousands and thousands of meters" manager Craig Rhoads says, Wallquest uses the metric system because most of their clients are from a different country. Once they are done printing that design they take the roller off of the press and all of the printed paper is then cut it into giant rolls (figure two). During the final steps, the giant rolls of wallpaper are  transferred to another cutting station where they cut it again.The now smaller rolls are sent through a machine where they are plastic wrapped and put into a heater to sealed then packaged and shipped out. This process could take an hour or a couple days it just depends on how much paper they are printing. They have to run twenty four hours and need all of the presses running or they won't get all the orders done in time.                                                    

Figure 4

         When you walk into Wallquest you are usually greeted with a warm smile by their amazing receptionist Hannah, but I didn't walk in that way. I walked in the workers entrance. First thing I noticed was the extremely loud noise of the presses. You need to wear ear protection every time you step in the warehouse.  You also will notice all the ink everywhere.  It's on the floors from spills that could have happened twenty years ago or a couple of days ago. Nice clothing is not recommended because you'll come out covered in ink.  However, the offices are a completely different world,  it is quiet and very clean.  There are beautiful drawings of different wall paper designs and then there are cubicles where the office workers take there calls and conduct business. Then you walk down a hall way with a giant fish tank in the wall and see ta Harley Davidson motorcycle in the middle of the room, That's where Brain Collins keeps one of his many motor cycles. This is where his beautiful office (figure four) is secluded in the back of the huge warehouse.
        When you picture a large factory's employees, you think dirty, sweaty, grumpy people who just got done working a long shift in a hot factory. Well Wallquest employees are all that, expect grumpy. When you listen to them talk and work they are either laughing about the conversations they are having or they are so focused on their work you just hear the presses running. Sadly I couldn't understand or hear most of the conversations because they mainly speak Spanish there. The majority of the workers who work at Wallquest are hispanic so they speak in there native language. Now Craig Rhoads said he picked up on a lot of different Spanish words however, most of them are curse words and  he still can't speak it fluently. When the workers are done with their day they punch out at the time clock like you seen in movies that take place in a factory.  They're all covered in ink and tired from the long days work but they always are talking and laughing, Mike one of the press workers exclaimed in a tired voice “I love it when the day ends but I love jt when it starts”.  So maybe next time you think of a million dollar company you think of Wallquest. Just like any of those huge billion dollar companies it takes just as much work to run Wallquest as it does to run Apple.