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Besides traditional full-service copy and print shop services, all stores also provide a number of self-service features: color and monochrome photocopiers, fax machines, digital photo printer kiosks, and several desktop computer rentals, of which one always has an image scanner and some design software (mainly Adobe Systems applications) installed. The computers available for rental are connected to at least one color and one monochrome laser printer (some newer stores have only a color printer but charge less for monochrome prints). The stores also offer a selection of office supplies and business books for retail purchase. The company's primary clientele consists of small business and home office clients. There are more than 1800 centers in Asia, Europe, and North America. With over $2 billion in revenues, the company is the 7th largest printing company in North America. The company was founded as Kinko's in 1970 by Paul Orfalea, whose nickname was "Kinko" because of his kinky (curly) hair. Its first copy shop--which Orfalea legendarily opened with a single sidewalk copy machine--was in the college community of Isla Vista next to the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He left the company in 2000, following a dispute with the investment firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, to which he had sold a large stake in the company three years earlier. As Orfalea later disclosed in his autobiography, it took an enormous amount of work by a small army of lawyers at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to disentangle him from Kinko's. The problem was that rather than adopt the traditional franchising model (by which the promoter creates a corporation that sells franchises), he had built the company as a series of loosely connected personal partnerships between each store owner and himself. By 1997, there were over 127 Kinko's partnerships in existence. All of them had to be carefully dismantled and rolled into a single S corporation in order to convert the company to a more centralized corporate-owned business model. Orfalea and several other key partners decided to go that route because they believed it would make the company more efficient (he was wasting too much time mediating disputes between different factions of Kinko's partnerships), and would enable the oldest partners, including himself, to cash out smoothly and engineer a transition of the company to a new generation of managers. Unfortunately, the new structure also made it easier for CDR to gradually force him out of his own company. Kinko's corporate headquarters was based in Ventura, California for many years, but in 2002, the company relocated to Galleria Tower in Dallas, Texas. In February 2004 Kinko's was bought by FedEx for $2.4 billion and then became known as FedEx Kinko's Office and Print Centers. Currently, Brian Phillips is the President and Chief Executive Officer, following Ken May's departure on March 7, 2008. Locations of FedEx Office centers currently include Canada, China, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States of America. Kinko's formerly operated in Australia, Mexico, and the Netherlands but withdrew from those markets in late 2008 due to low consumer demand for Kinko's services. FedEx Office's primary competitors in the crowded North American market include The UPS Store, OfficeMax, AlphaGraphics, Staples, Sir Speedy, and VistaPrint. On June 2, 2008, FedEx announced that they were rebranding FedEx Kinko's as FedEx Office, the retail branch of the FedEx Corporation. As of Spring 2010, some stores and branding still show FedEx Kinko's. FedEx Office offers the same services that FedEx Kinko's Office and Print Center locations did previously, with some small exceptions. To ease customer confusion during the transition period, many stores have a large purple sign in the window that says "Kinko's Inside." Prior to the acquisition by FedEx, most Kinko's stores were open 24 hours a day. After the acquisition, FedEx reduced the hours for many locations. |
