A Virtual Tour of Our World-Class Printing Facilities
/
If you ever need a reminder that industry can thrive in small communities, look no further than our company’s headquarters in Altona, Manitoba.
Boasting a population of 4,200, approximately one in eight of the town’s citizens is a Friesens employee-owner. Just as pages are sewn into our books, small town charm is woven into the fabric of the work we do day in and day out.
There’s no better method of seeing that local pride for yourself than by taking a tour of our printing facilities at One Printers Way. Our employee-owners love to take visitors through our state-of-the-art facilities in person, where they’ll see the next wave of bestsellers come off the line and hear some of the many stories from our 100+ years in the business.
Conveniently, our friends at Friesens HQ recently filmed an in-depth tour for those who won’t be travelling through Altona in the near future. Check it out below, and read on for a short interview with Friesens’s Corporate Marketing Manager, Pamela Hiebert. We spoke with Pamela to learn how to book a Friesens tour for yourself, why offering tours is so important to us, and much more.
For those reading who haven’t set foot in the plant, what’s Friesens like?
From the moment you walk in the doors and greet our receptionist to when you walk through the plant, you get this sense of warmth. The plant itself is incredibly clean — you could almost eat off the floors. Actually, our packaging plant, think4D, was recently doing some food and beverage certification, so we’re trying to become food safe in our plant. When they did the food-safe testing, our regular cleaning standard met all the stringent requirements for a food-safe environment without having to step it up. (Though we are going to step up our cleaning habits, even still.)
Beyond being clean and tidy, it’s the people that are smiling and greeting you — from people who are new to Canada to those who’ve been living here forever. There is this sense of, “I’m working and I feel safe, and I feel like my coworkers are my friends.” As cliché as it sounds, it does feel like a little bit of a family; that everybody has a general warmth and compassion for one another.
When you feel that, you become a Friesens person, because then you recognise that it’s more than books, labels, calendars, and journals. There’s a general understanding that there are people behind every book and behind every press — behind everything we build. It’s that humanity that makes Friesens special, and you really feel that when you’re here.
Friesens is a focal point of Altona and has been our company’s home since the early 1900s; can you describe Altona for someone who hasn’t visited?
In summer, Altona is beautifully green — especially in a rainy year like this one. You just look outside and the yards and flowers are perfectly manicured, because everybody in town seems to be proud of living here. They’re living, I think, that lifestyle that you almost think is the idyllic country lifestyle you only see in movies. You pick your own fruit; right now it’s strawberry season, so people are picking strawberries and bringing home pails full of strawberries to make jam. That’s really the feeling you get in Altona.
You walk down the street and can hardly not say hi to a dozen people that you know. It’s the kind of town where your kid probably plays baseball with the kid of your company’s CEO, and you get to know everybody — from the CEO to the person who sweeps the floor. We play on the same baseball teams, soccer teams, and hockey teams. It’s just a feeling of safety where people know that you can walk down the street and just feel like you can find friendship everywhere. It’s a good place to raise a family, and a good place to live.
What are some “wow” moments on the tour that you hear from people?
The cobots and robots are definitely a wow factor — especially from people who used to work here. The way we’re using cobots and robots to do some of the really hard, arduous labour (such as lifting crates of books) that would otherwise take a toll on the human body really impresses people.
Other people have that wow factor when you tell them how few of these printing presses exist in the world. That context is important. I know the HP Indigo 50000 isn’t the newest press today, but there are only four in the world and Friesens has two of them. When we put the 73” press in, there was only one other in the world. When it comes to the binding machines, we have three full hardcover binding lines and there’s only eight total in Canada. When you think about the technology that lives here in a small town of less than 5,000 people, it’s quite amazing that we’ve got all of this in such a tiny little corner of Canada.
We open up our doors wide for community tours about twice a year. This last spring, we toured a group of homeschooling kids who don’t get out on a lot of field trips. They came to Friesens and toured the plant, but it’s not just the kids who were inspired by it, it’s also the parents saying, “oh wow, this is right in our backyard.”
How do you recommend someone book a Friesens tour for themselves or their group?
You can definitely put your name in through our website. There’s a signup form there for the large local group tours we run twice a year. We do smaller tours within the year, but we tend to have a main spring and fall tour where we run all kinds of tours throughout the day. It’s really hard to do community tours all the time. But put your name in there, and then we will contact you and book you in for the right timing.
Why do you feel it’s important to offer tours of Friesens to customers and the public?
We’re proud of what we do, and we’re proud of who we are.
With vendors and customers, there are business reasons to tour them. They’re here for a press check, so we want to make them feel well taken care of; we tour them because we’re hoping to build a partnership of some kind, and they’re wanting to see how we can help them.
But with the community, it’s different. For the community tours, it’s a gesture to let them know, “you matter, and you’re part of our story.” The community can sometimes be our future employee-owners, our neighbours, or the people that we volunteer with on a board, or help out at the local festival — because they are all part of our story.
We need to tell our story, because that’s what we do: we print 32 million books every year, and we help our customers tell an awful lot of stories. Giving tours is one way we can share ours.
If you'd like to be a part of our story but can't make it in person, we hope the virtual tour welcomes you into the amazing work we do at Friesens. It's just one more way to open our doors to people curious about how our books get made.
