VOA常速英语:女性也能将印刷店开得红火

Alessandra Echeverria, the owner of Typecase Industries, is busy printing a series of postcards. She owns this design and print studio in Washington D C. Here every item is done with antique press machines. So this is a paper cutter specifically made for stacks, I call it the guillotine. So like the same top in there, it comes down the same way. The preparation stage takes more time than the printing. Here’s how it works.

A postcard design is first burned into photographic paper. Then it is transferred onto cards. Echeverria carefully places it under the press so the design appears correctly and precisely on the postcard. There’s no really fancy way to do this. You just get better and faster at guessing where it’s gonna be. With just a handful of paints, Echeverria recreates thousands of hues. She makes paints on the press machine rollers, and only after that starts printing. Echeverria learned the basics about these old machines at university, but it took years of practice to get really good at it. Sometimes if the machines break, she fixes them herself.
But they’re all pretty basic mechanical things. There’s no computer thinking inside this machine, so something that breaks is a physical thing, so you can usually figure out how to make another one. Echeverria has been printmaking for over a decade, and has mastered a job traditionally held by men. When I talked to people and I’ve gone to city offices or head meetings, sometimes people just probably don’t think I actually run this business or know what I’m talking about or actually run the machinery that’s in this business.
They’ll walk into the studio and see me working and still not believe that I know what is happening here. Echeverria said one reason her business is so successful is that people like things that are handmade. And then this computerized age of online shopping, she adds, customers really enjoy buying quality goods and products from someone they can meet face to face.
Iuliia Iarmolenko in Washington, VOA News.