Packing it in: Packing, shipping, printing biz seeks new owner

May 21, 2021  |  By Emmett Gartner

Pack & Send Plus sits at the entrance to downtown Waterbury along the roundabout. Photo by Lisa Scagliotti

Pack & Send Plus, a longtime workhorse for Waterbury-based small businesses, artists, and snail-mail enthusiasts alike, is approaching the end of an era as owner and founder Darrick Pitstick looks to sell the business in the coming months.

Pitstick launched the business 13 years ago with the help of his partner, Richard Drill, after they left their previous profession in Stowe and faced an uncertain future. “We had been inn-keeping in Stowe for seven and a half years and one day we found ourselves unemployed and homeless,” Pitstick said.

Shortly thereafter, the pair bought a house in Waterbury and Pitstick felt compelled to use his marketing background to start a local business. “I always had an interest in packing and shipping stores,” Pitstick confessed, “and I never actually pursued it until an opportunity came.”

That opportunity came in the form of a vacant storefront and a company that specializes in helping enthusiastic entrepreneurs kickstart their own packing and shipping stores. According to Pitstick, the parent company supplied him with the software, copy machines, and other equipment, and then sent him off to packing and shipping school at another peer store – a sort of boot camp for aspiring packers and shippers. 

After returning to his own storefront and preparing him for launch, the company left, and Pitstick and Pack & Send Plus were on their own. What followed was up to him. "It was just me for about a year and a half, then I brought in a part-time person,” Pitstick said. 

In the beginning, Pack & Send Plus had trouble developing a devout customer base that would make the store a preferred alternative to the post office or other shipping stores. “I created its name, nuts and bolts, the whole thing. At first everybody was like, ‘What is this new thing?’” Pitstick recalled. 

It wouldn’t be until almost five years later that Pack & Send Plus found its core base. According to Pitstick, it took “little old ladies to see us as the place to come and bring your box to ship, as opposed to the post office.”

By 2016, the shop transitioned from a hard-to-find location to a spot that’s hard to miss. It moved out of its inconspicuous space in a small commercial building along Route 100 above what is now Thai Smile restaurant to a high-profile storefront at the newly constructed roundabout intersection of Routes 100 and 2. Better access was one plus and more space meant it could add more services, Pitstick explained. 

Since then, business has steadily grown and the shop has become a staple of the Waterbury community. “We’re lucky to have Pack & Send Plus here in Waterbury,” said Karen Nevin, executive director of the nonprofit Revitalizing Waterbury economic development group. “They make doing business infinitely easier for small businesses.”

Part of the “plus” to the shop’s offerings is its ability to outfit customers such as organizers of arts festivals and various community events with signs and banners; the shop can make large copies of architectural drawings and print photographs. 

All of these are services people would otherwise need to look for outside of town. “It’s important for small businesses to be a part of the financial life-line for the town,” Pitstick said.

Darrick Pitstick, owner of Pack & Send Plus, hopes to find a buyer for his busy packing, shipping and printing shop. Photo by Gordon Miller

Recently, the shop printed banners for businesses in the Waterbury area to signify that they were open during the coronavirus pandemic. Should a pet go missing, Pitstick never hesitates to cover the cost of the first set of “lost pet” posters to help with the search.

In addition to appreciating Pitstick’s community-centered approach, Nevin said she admires how high the store’s baseline standard of day-to-day operations is.

“Yes, there are the big companies like VistaPrint, and the UPS Store, and they all serve their purpose, but what I love about Darrick and Pack & Send Plus is the ease and convenience,” Nevin said. “They’ll always figure out how to make it happen for you.” 

Waterbury Center graphic designer Laura Parette and her customers rely on the Pack & Send and Pitstick. “The quality of his work is always really good,” Parette said, “and the turnaround on projects is excellent. Some of my clients have projects where they need 25 of something, or 50 – nothing where you’d go to a bigger, traditional printer – going to Pack & Send Plus is more affordable and provides a faster turnaround.”

It’s regular customers that form a solid baseline business, Pitstick said. Over its 13 years in operation, he said his shop has evolved into something like that fictional TV Boston bar from the 1980s because of the regular customers who often take the time to chat at the counter as they hand off boxes to be weighed and labeled. “We’re like a packing store version of ‘Cheers’,” Pitstick joked. “We have the same folks coming in and some are real characters.”

Pitstick said his bond with his customer base — and his sales — strengthened during the coronavirus pandemic. “During the pandemic, we actually experienced a 20% increase in shipping business,” he said. “The effect was most noticed during the Christmas holidays. With traveling restrictions in force, most people could not visit their relatives, and needed to ship their gifts. Currently, shipping sales have remained robust.”

Although the shop now is physically divided with plastic screens and shower curtains, Pitstick and staff are still helping customers with their most everyday and intimate needs from mailing birthday presents to grandchildren, shipping items related to work-from-home arrangements, to sending supplies to local college students away at school. 

For Pack & Send Plus, the year of COVID-19 hasn’t been the first time the store has stepped up to meet the challenges of disaster. A decade ago brought a different calamity that devastated Waterbury residents and required community-sourced resilience to overcome —Tropical Storm Irene.

“In the first couple of weeks after [Irene], we were giving out boxes for free, just to help our local folks out,” Pitstick said. “People were left with nothing, and anything they did have left was in wet piles. We tried to help that way, and I live in the village, too, so it was very important for me to try and be there for the community.”

One reason you won’t find Parette frequenting any other print shops are examples like this of Pack & Send Plus’s commitment to the community. “[Pitstick] is also a really great member of the community. He does business here and he lives here, but he supports a lot of efforts by nonprofits — I personally appreciate that in a business that I’m doing work with,” she said.

In planning his exit strategy from Pack & Send Plus, Pitstick said he hopes whomever he sells to will continue the store’s community focus. “I would love for it to be someone local,” Pitstick professed. “You can’t rely on that, but I’d like for it to be someone that lives in this community and wants to be a part of this community.”

He also added that he hopes for a transition that will allow his three full-time and one part-time employee to stay on, noting that they can provide consistency with day-to-day operations. 

As for Pitstick’s future, there is no telling where he might land. “I don’t know. I haven’t made that plan yet,” he said. “I have a marketing background that I gained when I was in corporate America, I’d like to use that. I’m not ready to retire. I just need to try something new.”