Select Imaging sells the whole job, right down to the last fold

A brochure is a surprisingly unfinished thing when it comes off the press. Someone still has to fold it, put it in the right envelope, check the address and get it moving. Add a conference booth, staff shirts and a box of giveaways, and a modest marketing assignment starts requiring its own traffic controller. Select Imaging, in Dublin, California, has built a business around taking on those connected tasks. The printed sheet is one part of the order.

Its range runs from business cards and carbonless forms to direct mail, apparel and packaging. The common thread is practical: customers have something to announce, sell, explain or distribute. The company offers both production and help working out how the pieces should fit together. That makes it useful to examine as a local service business, especially for buyers whose job description does not include knowing how to prepare a die cut.

First, they shared the floor

The origin story starts with a landlord-and-tenant arrangement. Les Jacob founded Select Press & Graphics in 1991. Four years later, he subleased space to Leon Gundersen, then a manager at a CopyMat franchise in nearby Pleasanton. Gundersen opened Select Copy Center. For roughly two years the businesses operated independently, close enough to share an address while retaining separate identities.

In 1997, they merged as Select Imaging. The company’s own history credits the addition of direct-mail marketing and promotional products with helping its subsequent growth. The strategic logic is easy to understand: a customer ordering a printed promotion may also need it mailed, and a customer preparing for an event may need something to give away. Those adjacent needs offered more work around an existing relationship.

There is also an independent marker of progress. In April 2012, Pleasanton Chamber member news reported that CPrint International had recognized Jacob and Gundersen for sales growth. The account described a printer increasing business during a slow economy and participating in a program with operating and training standards. It provides a dated achievement without requiring the reader to mistake an old growth story for a current financial report.

The customer needs a campaign, not a pile of paper

Select Imaging addresses businesses, nonprofits, schools and event organizers across the Tri-Valley. Its website also points to nearby East Bay communities, including Hayward, Fremont and Castro Valley. This is a market where a fundraising event, a storefront promotion and an office’s recurring paperwork can all become print orders. The work changes; the need for an understandable ordering process does not.

A particularly concrete example sits in the February 2026 newsletter of the Friends of the Castro Valley Library. The publication names Select Imaging as its printer. It is a modest credit, but a revealing one. Local organizations still need information turned into an object that can circulate among members and supporters. A newsletter puts the business’s role into clearer focus than a long list of hypothetical industries.

Some of the offer is thoroughly workaday. Select Imaging advertises litigation copying, exhibit enlargement, index tabs and Bates stamping, alongside familiar cards and brochures. These are documents people need to navigate and use. A correctly ordered packet or readable exhibit has a different purpose from a glossy promotional piece, yet both depend on getting production details right.

The business model follows those assignments: customers buy products and project services, with online ordering, estimates and reorders available. An account provides access to past orders and the status of existing ones. For a recurring buyer, that history can be more useful than starting from a blank specification every time the supply cupboard runs low.

One logo, several very different surfaces

The current apparel offer makes the coordination argument explicit. Select Imaging advertises a dedicated account manager to help keep garments consistent with signage, promotional items and printed marketing. Embroidery, screen printing and direct-to-film printing cover different kinds of decoration. A stitched polo and a multicolor event shirt are separate production decisions, even when they carry the same organization’s name.

Its graphics services extend from brochures and workplace documents to logo design and websites. The company specifically offers landing pages for QR-code campaigns. That is a useful connection: a printed invitation to act needs somewhere sensible to send the person who scans it. For a buyer, the design conversation can include both the physical piece and what happens after someone responds.

Packaging takes the same idea into three dimensions. Select Imaging offers custom packaging and fulfillment for retail products, ecommerce orders and employee gifts, including projects for staff who work away from the office. Labels, stickers and exterior branding are part of that offer. A box becomes another place where the company name, colors and message have to agree.

It would be a mistake to read breadth as proof that every buyer needs the whole menu. Someone replenishing a simple business card may need very little consultation. The appeal becomes clearer when several products must agree on appearance, arrive for the same occasion and carry the same message. That is where managing separate orders starts to feel like another job.

The last fold earns its keep

The finishing list is where the shop’s practical character comes into view. It includes collating, folding, laminating, numbering, perforating and stitching, along with handwork such as gluing, tying, inserting and packing. Those verbs describe the distance between a stack of sheets and something a customer can actually use. They also give buyers a vocabulary for asking for the finished object.

Specialty work adds tactile choices. The letterpress services include embossing, which raises a design, and debossing, which recesses it. Foil stamping adds a metallic element. Die cutting can create an unusual outline or an opening within a piece, while scoring prepares heavier stock for folding. Each choice belongs in the design discussion early enough to influence the layout.

Consider a hypothetical invitation with a shaped edge and a thick cover. Choosing those features after approving ordinary flat artwork invites another round of decisions. The lesson suggested by Select Imaging’s menu is to describe the object first: how it opens, where it folds, what the recipient removes and whether it goes into an envelope. The artwork should answer those questions.

“Somebody nice will always answer!”Select Imaging’s contact-page promise

The company’s service philosophy emphasizes honesty, speed, repeated inspections and friendly staff. Those are its stated priorities, rather than an independent guarantee of any particular order. Still, they identify what the business is selling alongside production: the chance to ask a person a question before an uncertain choice becomes a box of finished copies.

The mailbox changes the brief

Direct mail adds another set of decisions. Select Imaging lists address-list management, addressing, inserting, presorting and delivery to the post office. The customer can bring more of the assignment to one provider, from design through mailing preparation. In practical terms, a campaign brief needs to identify the recipient as carefully as it identifies the paper.

NeighborMail focuses on nearby neighborhoods, using jumbo postcards. The company also offers Every Door Direct Mail campaigns directed at selected postal routes. That makes geographic concentration central to the proposition. A business seeking nearby households has a different targeting problem from one trying to reach a handful of specialist buyers scattered across the country.

The sensible takeaway is to choose the audience before admiring the postcard. A route-based mailing can suit a local service area; it is a less natural match when relevance depends on a narrow job title or an existing customer relationship. That is an inference from how the service is structured, not a claim about Select Imaging’s campaign results. Printing and distribution cannot decide who should care.

Price the finished object

A useful quote request describes quantity, dimensions, artwork, material, finishing and delivery. Select Imaging’s help center directs customers toward estimates and offers file-preparation guidance and templates. Its printing FAQ also discusses color modes and converting files for production. Buyers can use those resources to make the first conversation more specific and reduce unresolved choices.

Cost comparisons should use the same finished specification. A flat sheet and a folded, inserted mailing are different purchases. So are an undecorated garment and a branded one, or a banner graphic and a complete display. The point is to ask which parts of the assignment a quote includes before treating two totals as interchangeable.

There is a small economy in the signage offer that deserves attention. Select Imaging advertises replacement graphics for retractable banners, allowing the stand to serve another campaign. For recurring events, the useful question is whether the message needs replacing or the hardware does. That is a concrete purchasing choice, with less romance than a new display and potentially less material to replace.

The broader service model will matter less to a buyer with finished artwork, a simple commodity order and no need for local assistance. Other full-service printers also compete for complex work; Minuteman Press in Fremont appears alongside Select Imaging in Visual Media Alliance’s spring 2025 coverage. Select Imaging’s case rests on the fit between its service range and the customer’s assignment.

A little festive evidence

One cheerful detail belongs outside the usual printing checklist. Select Imaging won the Most Festive/Creative category in Dublin’s 2016 holiday decorating contest, with recognition scheduled at the January 2017 city council meeting. A business paid to help other people attract attention evidently found an occasion to decorate for itself.

The library newsletter and the holiday award place the company in ordinary civic life. Its useful promise is similarly grounded: bring the pieces of a physical communication job into one conversation. For the customer planning an event, a mailing or a new set of materials, the best opening question may be the least technical one: what should this look like when it is completely finished?