One of Warburton’s oldest businesses, the family run printing company L.S. Gill and Son has hung up its tools after 80 years of service to the township.
Owner Jeff Gill decided to move out of the business’s main building off Thomas Avenue and in the process has said goodbye to the old letterpress and offset printers which had served the business over the years.
He managed to find a new home for his 1964 Heidelberg Platen Press, while his two-colour Aurelia offset press had to go to scrap.
“If they weren’t so heavy I could’ve sold them,” Mr Gill said.
L.S. Gill and Son was the main place to go for businesses’ printing needs in Warburton.
They would take on jobs ranging from invoice books, business cards, phone books, newsletters and much more.
Mr Gill’s father started the printing business in 1964 after moving from Ballarat to Warburton, where a young 16-year-old Jeff Gill would leave school to work for the family business.
With no other printers in the area, there was little competition for the Gill family, and they’d end up landing big-ticket clients such as the Upper Yarra Shire and the Thompson River Scheme.
In 1971, they’d move to their iconic location on Thomas Avenue, where Mr Gill has operated since.
“Back in those days we used to do commercial printer jobs like business cards, wedding invitations, invoice books,” Mr Gill said.
But as technology advanced and digital printing became the norm, L. S. Gill and Son started to lose business.
“The mainstream of work we did generally started to go, as people started to do it online themselves and it just changed it all.”
Though in hindsight, Mr Gill said he should’ve invested in more modern technology to adapt to the changing landscape, the business still found ways to keep a reliable flow of work.
“We should have spent some money then and got some really good equipment. But again, a lot of printers did that in the 90s and 2000s and have gone broke.
“I’m involved in a couple of car clubs and they have a monthly newsletter. They found out I was a printer and so I’ve been printing… those newsletters for nearly 40 years now.”
However, eventually he lost his clients as the affordability of digital printing has made businesses switch to doing it themselves.
But Mr Gill knows it’s time to move on.
“I’m 72, so I knew I’d have to retire one day, and unfortunately all the old machines had to be scrapped,” Mr Gill said.
