Impressions Advertising Specialties has had a rough start to the new decade, with their office burning down in January earlier this year. However, last Friday they took a large step forward with a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate the construction of their new offices on Goodwill Road.
“We’re out here today with Impressions Advertising for the groundbreaking ceremony. Craig has been working hard on and it’s a great opportunity to see a business relocating in Webster Parish,” said Wayne McMahen, State Representative of Dist. 10.
“We’re always looking for opportunities to bring business to the parish and to district ten, and I think Craig is stepping forward and doing that for us and I’m just honored to be a part of that today.”
Craig Watson, the owner of Impressions, stated that their plan is for the building to be work-ready by August. “Our busy season is the end of the year, we do sixty percent of our business in the last four months of the year, so our target date is August 15. Our builder is M&A builders. We have a good long relationship with them. we’re trying to use as many local vendors as we can and we’re trying to sue customers that have bought with us for twenty plus years.”
One benefit that Craig stated to building from the ground up was being able to design the space around their needs as a business.
“We were able to design the building around what our needs were. What we had before we just bought an old building and made it work. This is going to be designed to fit our specific needs and workflow. We’ll have a bigger showroom, nice big conference room, and we’re going to have 1200 sp feet of open warehouse to keep our customer’s supply,” said Watson.
He also shared what the groundbreaking ceremony represented for himself, his employees, and his business. “This is a new dawn for us. Between everything that is going on, the fire, the virus, we’ve been hit twice in four months,” said Watson.
“But we’ve stayed positive, we’ve got a super good team. Not just our salespeople but our office staff. They were able to build an office in under five hours and get us back and running. We continue to grow, and currently, we’re the largest promotional products distributors in Louisiana.”