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2001 New Jersey's Finest;
Changing With the Times
By Diana Lasseter Drake, BUSINESS NEWS New Jersey
September 4-10, 2001
 Debra Taeschler is reminiscing about the sometimes improvised history of her Chester-based marketing and advertising company.
There was the time Gráfica was but a three-person operation in the basement of Taeschler's East Hanover home. She and her small team stayed up all night perfecting a project, and she was forced to greet the client first thing in the morning in her pajamas.
More recently, in May, was the deal forged between Gráfica.eCRM, a separate Gráfica company focused on customer relationship management, and R.R. Donnelley Financial, a worldwide financial printer, that was born from a casual conversation Taeschler had with Gráfica's compensation consultant. That random beginning has turned into Gráfica.eCRM's most important alliance.
Despite evidence to the contrary, Gráfica's success hasn't been an accident. Taeschler hears her mother Marion's mantra echoing through Gráfica's halls: Either you do it right or you don't do it at all. Those words prompted a young Taeschler to remake her bed to perfection and refold the towels into a terry cloth triumph in the linen cabinet. They have also inspired her to hold her business up to equally stringent standards. "I've always had a strong belief in how things should be done," explains Taeschler.
It shows. GráficaGroup, which consists of three companies, GráficaAdvertising Inc., GráficaInter.active Ltd., and Gráfica.eCRM Corp., offers an array of services from marketing planning and integration, and so-called data mining for improving customer relationships, to Web site design and hosting. Sales have risen from $10.5 million in 1997 to $26.2 million last year. Clients include AT&T, Lucent Technologies, PSE&G, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, and The New Jersey Lottery. "The first time AT&T had major cutbacks in the mid-1990s, we were seriously compromised," Taeschler recalls. "A lot of our work had been with AT&T. Had we not been that shaken we would not have had the dedicated new business effort we've had since then. Out of the depths come the heights."
That determination, accented by an artistic flair, has helped turn a career-minded marketing specialist into an independent-minded entrepreneur. Taeschler, a Hudson County native, graduated from Rutgers-Newark as an art major in 1975. She then started her design-oriented career at Newark's Hahne's Department store. She eventually took a job as a production coordinator with advertising agency McCaffrey & McCall in New York City, then moved back to New Jersey after a few years to work for two other ad agencies. "I got a lot of experience in those days," Taeschler says of her early career moves. "I was a designer, a mechanical artist, a production manager, an account manager, and a vice president of accounts." As a result, she says, "You know the totality of the process."
And, in Taeschler's case, you develop a strong sense of how things should be done. She wasn't satisfying that need as an employee of someone else's agency. So in 1986, she started Gráfica in the basement of her East Hanover home, which, she jokes, was nothing more than a root cellar. The company eventually moved to Main Street in Chester and had its current building built about six years ago. Two very important people and one key client followed Taeschler from her last agency job: her partner, John Puglionisi, now vice president and creative director of GráficaInter.active, Fermin Mendoza, now senior production manager of GráficaGroup and AT&T.
In many ways, Taeschler credits Gráfica's continuing relationship with AT&T for motivating the company to innovate and grow. Working with AT&T International put tiny Gráfica up against huge advertising agencies such as Young & Rubicam and Ogilvy & Mather.
In an industry that is being transformed by technology, namely the Internet, Taeschler also points to Gráfica's early tech commitment as a differentiator. "When we opened our doors, we had a Mac on every desk," she says, adding that her husband, John, who had his master's in computer science, was responsible for those first critical connections.
The company is still on the technological frontlines, especially through its work at Gráfica.eCRM, which was formed last October. Use of customer relationship management software to better understand customers' needs is catching on quickly. Taeschler says it is Gráfica.eCRM's job to add value to that process. "Just because you have Microsoft Word doesn't make you a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist," she says. "It's all about the right message at the right time at the right place in the right medium. It's my job to communicate to the customer and ask how you want these things."
"There's challenge after challenge after challenge," she says of running her own business. "I can't be complacent. I need to continue to seek out new technologies, better processes. It motivates me as a person."
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