Issue link: https://nbm.uberflip.com/i/1451382
1 8 G R A P H I C S P R O • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2 G R A P H I C S - P R O. C O M R apid got it s st a r t in Bentonville, Arkansas, the home turf of Walmart. It was started by a group of guys who needed a quick and efficient way to produce pack- aging and display samples for presentation to Walmart buyers. Many of Walmart's top suppliers make Bentonville their home, but there were limited resources in the city for producing prototypes of packaging and displays, says Kyle Jack, owner of Rapid. Jack was friends with the group that started the company. "I wasn't in the retail sector and didn't know anything about Walmart per se or packaging, but I did come from a commercial printing back- ground," he says. e group came to him asking how to produce some of these dif- ferent projects. "I had ink in my blood for sure. I'd always known I had that entrepreneurial spirit, a desire to own my own business and serve clients. I knew I didn't want to work for someone else long-term," Jack says. One of the key requirements Jack put down when he agreed to work for Rapid was that he would have the opportunity to buy the company. "ey were agreeable to that. ey didn't want to own the business; they just needed the service to be here in Bentonville. at's why they started it. ey were happy to launch my career, if you will, and launch this business and go from there," he says. Jack was 23 years old when he started working with Rapid. He came on board to manage the business for a couple of years before he and his wife, Kelly, bought the company in 2005. Initially, the business was called Rapid Prototypes, but it was recently rebranded to better encompass a wider range of printing specialties. In the beginning, the company was very focused on prototyping for corrugated displays, "any of the palette displays and trays you see on shelves is almost exclu- sively what we were doing and packaging in small quantities," Jack says. As the need grew, the company got into the primary packaging side of the busi- ness, including flexible packaging but on a Kyle Jack, owner of Rapid in Bentonville, Arkansas. (All images courtesy Rapid) S I G N A G E & P R I N T I N G ARKANSAS-BASED RAPID BECOMES PREMIER PACKAGE SHOP B Y P A U L A A V E N G L A D Y C H