225 Years of Helping Hartford Businesses: Joseph Merritt & Company

Kevin Perry in Joseph Merritt’s Hartford office.

This year, the Hartford Chamber of Commerce turns 225 years old. We turned to the community to speak with businesses both longstanding and new to the scene to learn more about their history and relationship with the Chamber. Below is a truncated interview with Digital Marketing Manager Jenn Accuosti and the President and COO of Joseph Merritt & Company, Kevin Perry:

Kevin, thank you for joining me. I would love if you could give me a brief introduction of yourself and the business.

Sure. So today we're at 650 Franklin Avenue here in Hartford, Connecticut, and have been here since the sixties. Before that, we were on Pearl Street, founded in 1908 by Joe Merritt.

Joe Merritt was an architect on the second floor of an office building, and he had a few blueprints fall out of the window and decided, ‘you know what? I think I'm gonna move to the first floor,’ and he opened up a blueprinting company. From 1908 till about 1988, we were really supporting architects, engineers, and construction. Then my father, Ed Perry, bought it from Bob Merritt. So, there was Joe Merritt and Bob Merritt, and the Merritt family is a distant relative of the Perry family, so it still is a family business.

From there we took the business from blueprinting and added small format printing, so books, training manuals, brochures. Then we also added large format graphics, which are the graphics you see on walls or on floors, car wraps, truck wraps, and we've done graphics for buildings and billboards and things of that nature.

The latest evolution of the business has been 3D laser scanning of buildings and spaces that create schematics or 3D modeling files that architects can use.

So, this business started in Hartford and even though it's changed and moved offices, it's stayed here. Why Hartford?

Hartford has always been our headquarters. We do have operations in Danbury and the New Haven area, in Rhode Island in the Providence area, but Hartford has always been the epicenter of the business. We do a lot of business with the state, whether that's the Department of Transportation or the State Senate House. So for us, being in the city of Hartford, the thought of leaving it isn't really there.

Since this interview is for our 225-year celebration, I know you are currently Chamber members. Can you speak more about that?

A look inside Capital Ice Cream’s new space. Check out the full work by Joseph Merritt here.

Well, yeah. So I think, you know, like any business, there's evolutions. My father took over in ‘88 and was part of the Chamber. And like every company, you have your ups and your downs, and you go through those cycles. When I took over the business five years ago, I had to make some changes to the business to look at how we were gonna move the business forward in a different direction. And I just felt it was the right time to reengage with the Chamber. Not only to give back, but also benefit from the community and the network that it establishes. We don't just work with big customers, we got a lot of small customers that just come through the door that need help with their businesses.

Like for example, we're working with Capital Ice Cream on Capitol Avenue, and we're doing some of the graphics. They have one guy in there who's doing paint work and doing one of the wall murals, and then we're doing some of the graphics on the wall, and then we're gonna do a 3D scan of his virtual space so that he can promote it on his website and share it with the community.

I was curious if you've noticed any evolutions within the Chamber from your perspective, if there was anything that jumped out to you since joining.

I've recognized that companies need help. Every company needs help. I don't care how big you are or how small you are, they need the support of the community. And sometimes they need the support of the city, and sometimes they need the support of the Chamber. You can't do it alone. You need your customers, you need your bankers, you need your suppliers, you need your employees, so no company can do any of what they do without help. And so, we were members, and then we took some time off and I said, no, we need to get back into it. You need help and you need that support from your network. So that's really my reason for doing it more than anything else.

Last question here, as the Chamber celebrates its 225th anniversary, I wanted to know if you had a message that you'd like to share with the community and fellow members?

I think I want people to be able to walk through this door and if they need help and they want to talk to me, or see what Joseph Merritt can do, I will help them. What's interesting about this company is we make you look good, whether it's through our graphics, through our printing, through our 3D scanning and putting it on a website, our job is to make your company look good and be successful, so I think that's my message to them is we have an open door. That's the kind of company we are, we will help you.