Hi, my name is Steve Bonin. I purchased Harris Stationery Ltd from my parents in 1988: who had purchased it from my maternal grandfather in 1964. Grandpa Harris started in the office supply business, with Harris Stationery and Office Supplies, in 1953, here on Main Street, Milton, Ontario.

We are a founding member of Office Pro, formerly Guild Stationers, founded in 1970. Collectively, the members sell office supplies through 100 stores across Canada, most in small towns like Milton. It is our membership in Office Pro that allowed us to offer competitive pricing and next day delivery on a huge variety of office supplies.

The changing business climate since 1990 has forced me to seek other avenues of business to flesh-out my offering. One of those avenues was to ramp-up the printing portion of the business. Dad had a steady clientele of local businesses that used his printing services through the 1970’s and into the 80’s. With changes in technology, and the increased work load in the office supply business, dad let the printing business slide to focus on the goods side of the business.

In the early 90’s I started with CorelDraw 3, the premium program at the time, and designed some small print jobs for output on the in-house colour photocopier, while brokering larger jobs, mostly forms, to trade printers in the GTA.

In 2005, it became evident that brokering jobs to the USA, as far away as California, and paying the shipping back was a profitable venture, so most of my colour work went to the States. By 2007 an American firm set up shop in Mississauga, which made things much easier, but they demanded payment in $US.

By 2008-2009 there were a handful of Canadian firms in the GTA that had adopted and improved the American model of delivering Fast, Cheap, High-Quality, colour work to the Canadian Marketplace. These firms have invested millions in equipment and web-portals to glean market-share and what they have discovered is – keep print brokers happy and you get repeat business. Many of the other types of printers have followed suit and are actively recruiting print-brokers and graphic artists into their coral.

Now, in 2011, we do not sell any office supplies anymore, we are strictly graphic artists and print-brokers.

So I currently represent dozens of trade-printers including large format and ad-specialty. I have been doing artwork for print since the early 1990’s and my philosophy is High Impact, simple messages.

This is the seventh revision of this website; prompted mainly by the new changes in business and the need to make the website smart-phone compatible. I code by hand, mostly in html, with some flash thrown in to make it interesting. I have tried, with some success, to make these pages using only percentages so they will resolve on any size of screen. It has been a trip!

Steve Bonin July 2011