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How Culligan Quench Aligned Its Print Operations With Its Sustainability Mission

CHALLENGE

Culligan Quench helps businesses eliminate single-use plastic water bottles, a mission rooted in reducing waste wherever possible. As the company grew, its internal print operations hadn’t yet caught up to that same standard. Marketing collateral for its sales team was mass-printed, boxed up, and stored in office space across the country, then discarded in bulk every time a product detail changed or the brand was refreshed. 

Megan Backus, Director of Marcom and Sales Enablement at Culligan Quench, managed this process herself for years, spending one full day a week packing and shipping collateral to a sales team of 100 to 150 reps. The workload wasn’t sustainable from a staffing standpoint, but the bigger issue ran deeper. As Backus put it, the real motivation to change wasn’t cost, it was making sure the company’s print practices matched the environmental commitment it asked its customers to make. 

“Printing stacks and stacks of collateral and storing it in an office space is not environmentally friendly for a company trying to rid the world of plastic water,” Backus said. “It was less about cost and more about continuing to walk the walk of the environmentally conscious talk we present ourselves as.”

HOW MIMEO HELPED

Culligan Quench turned to Mimeo's print on demand and Marketplace solutions to close the gap between its mission and its operations. Today, the company runs three separate Marketplace storefronts: one for its main sales team, one for its Canadian sales team, and one for its hospitality-focused reps, who need access to industry-specific collateral. Each rep works within a preset budget, ordering exactly what they need, when they need it, rather than pulling from a shared stockpile of pre-printed material.

Mimeo Marketplace also handles Culligan Quench's branded swag, including reusable water bottles, water droplet-shaped stress balls, and pens, items reps use both for customer touchpoints and to support "office champions" who help other organizations transition away from bottled water systems.

What used to require Backus's hands-on involvement every week now runs largely on its own. She receives a weekly report on swag inventory, and every month her team adds new hires to the system with a budget already assigned. "It's very much set it and forget it," Backus said. "Mimeo is kind of like an extension of what our reps have access to."

THE RESULT

The shift to print on demand has let Culligan Quench's sales organization grow without adding strain to its marketing team. The sales force has nearly quadrupled in size over the past decade, yet the five-person team responsible for content no longer spends any time on fulfillment. Backus estimated that the equivalent of a full-time role, the work of packing and shipping to a growing rep base five days a week, has effectively been eliminated by moving to on-demand printing.

That time has gone directly back into content creation. Rather than managing physical inventory or trying to track down which reps still have outdated material, Backus's team can focus on producing accurate, up-to-date collateral and responding to what reps and customers actually need.

The sustainability impact has been just as significant. Culligan Quench no longer prints in bulk or stores pallets of collateral that may become obsolete within months. Material is produced only when a rep places an order, which has cut down substantially on paper waste and eliminated the need for dedicated office storage space, the same kind of footprint the company works with its own customers to reduce.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Beyond efficiency and waste reduction, print on demand has given Culligan Quench something harder to quantify but just as valuable: confidence in the accuracy of what's in the field. Product and spec sheets carry real risk if they're wrong. A rep handing out an outdated dimension sheet can lead to real consequences for a customer down the line.

With Mimeo, updates to a product sheet go live the same day a change is made. Reps are notified, and because they're ordering in small quantities against a set budget, outdated material doesn't linger in circulation the way it once did.

"Version control is easier to manage with an on-demand printing partner," Backus said. "I don't have to worry about the wrong spec sheet getting into a customer's hands. It's just not a thing that happens."