FedEx Ditches Kinko's

(page 2 of 2)

asp?personId=158095&symbol=FDX'>Paul Orfalea, whose nickname was Kinko because of his curly hair. When Orfalea started the company in the 1970s, to service students at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the name stuck. And over the years, Kinko's kept its laid-back reputation. It was a place where you would invariably find big, noisy copy machines, piles of paper boxes, and sometimes sleepy employees, especially late at night in the middle of a copy emergency.

In 1996, Orfalea sold a stake in Kinko's to private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, which started cleaning up the company's act. Clayton, in turn, sold the company to FedEx, which continued overhauling Kinko's, investing in new branches and technology and retraining staff.

But the arrival of cheap printers and PDF files made the concept of the corner copy shop, and tackling projects like binding hundreds of copies of a big report, largely irrelevant. That meant the Kinko's brand was destined to go the way of BetaMax and Atari, which didn't survive technological advances.

"The Kinko's brand wasn't elastic or evocative enough to move into the 3.0 economy," notes Brian Collins, chief creative officer of Collins:, a design and branding company in New York. "It is too grounded in analog thinking." By comparison, "Office" is rich with meaning and more utilitarian. "An office is the place where work gets done, a laboratory to invent things, a place to go create," Collins explains. FedEx Office, he adds, "sounds like it could be a software system."

Despite the demise of the Kinko's name, there still might be a place for it in the FedEx universe. "Maybe we could use it in a minor way somewhere in the store," Christiansen muses, noting that the company still owns the name. "Perhaps we could label the copiers Kinko Copiers."

Business Exchange related topics:
Branding
Brand Identity
Brand Marketing
Business-Analysis
Business Intelligence

Ernest Beck spent almost a decade as a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Budapest and London. After leaving the Journal in 2002, he became a freelance contributor to numerous publications including the New York Times, Metropolitan Home, and SmallBiz.