We started as a photo lab. We never stopped thinking like one.
Volume Sports Photo is the wholesale banner arm of Platon Graphics, a family owned Los Angeles print shop in its second generation. Seven decades in photography and print. Digital printing since 1997. All of it now pointed at photographers shooting 10 or more teams a year.
Takes less than a minute
Picture day only happens once.
You can't reshoot a season. When a banner shows up two days late, or the school's blue comes back purple, the parent doesn't blame the printer. They don't know the printer exists. They blame you.
So we spend our energy on two boring things. Dates and color.
We've had seven decades to get boring right.
Two owners. One family. Nobody in between.
Most wholesale printers won't tell you who owns them. Here's ours.
Nicholas Platon, Founder
Nicholas opened the doors in 1952 as a family owned commercial photo studio and lab in Los Angeles. He shot and processed for McDonald's, Zenith TV, and Procter and Gamble. He built the company around one idea. Get the picture right, then get it out the door on time.
Charles Platon, President
Charles took over from his father in 1989 and still runs the company today. He moved the shop into architectural and real estate work, then into digital printing in 1997, and he's the one who decides what jobs we take.
He's also the reason a person answers the phone here, and the reason we sell six products instead of forty. Charles would rather do a short list well than a long list badly.
Two owners in seven decades. Nobody bought this company. Nobody flipped it. There's no private equity office in another state deciding whether your order ships.
How a photo lab became your banner printer
The short version.
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1952
It starts with a camera, not a printer
Nicholas Platon opens a family owned commercial photo studio and lab in Los Angeles. The client list gets serious fast. McDonald's. Zenith TV. Procter and Gamble. We spent the first stretch of our life shooting and processing photographs, which is why we're so particular about how yours reproduce.
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1989
Charles Platon takes over from his father
The second generation begins. Charles moves the shop into work for major architectural firms and real estate developers, where a print that's off by a shade gets rejected and reprinted on your dime. That's where the quality control habits came from.
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1997
We go digital, and we go early
3M certifies us as a digital printer. Wide format digital was still new and most shops were farming it out. We brought it in house and started printing banners and murals for photographers, museums, and Fortune 500 brands. Abercrombie and Fitch and Guess? hire us to build and install the barricades that wrap their stores during construction.
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1999
We throw out the chemicals
Every wet photo process in the building gets shut down for good. Most shops were still running them. We were early, and we never went back.
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2002
A leader in large and grand format
Pacific Sunwear and Westfield Malls come on board. The presses get bigger, the runs get longer, and volume stops being scary. A 500 piece order becomes a normal Tuesday.
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Today
Volume Sports Photo
Same family. Same building. Same presses. One difference. This side of the shop exists only for team and league photographers, and everything ships under your name instead of ours.
That 2 million is the lifetime count. The tens of thousands is just the past twelve months, printed for individual photographers and volume shooters. Seventy years in, we're busier than we've ever been.
We've been printing digitally since 1997. A lot of your options weren't in business yet.
1997 is the year 3M certified us as a digital printer. That was early. Wide format digital was still new, most shops were still farming it out to somebody else, and plenty of the printers bidding against us today hadn't opened yet.
Since then we've printed banners and murals for three kinds of clients who don't accept excuses.
Photographers
Volume shooters, studios, and labs who need the jersey to come back the color it was on the field. We came out of a photo lab, so we treat a team's blue the way a lab treats skin tone. In the past twelve months alone we've printed tens of thousands of banners for individual photographers and volume shooters. This isn't a side business we're testing.
Museums
Wall sized murals under gallery lighting, where a visitor stands two feet away and studies the surface. There's nowhere to hide on a job like that.
Fortune 500 corporations
Abercrombie and Fitch. Guess?. Pacific Sunwear. Westfield Malls. Brand standards you don't get to bend, install dates you don't get to move.
That museum work is the one worth thinking about. If a mural holds up with somebody's nose an inch from it, a team banner at thirty feet isn't a hard day.
What actually separates us from the other guy
You have options. Here's what you're really comparing.
Broker the job out to whoever's cheapest that week, which is why the color moves between orders
Print it here. Our building, our presses, our people, every single time
Came up printing signs, trade show booths, and vehicle wraps
Came up as a photo studio and lab. We were photographers first
Photography is one line item in a long product list
Photography has been the business since 1952
Learned digital when it got cheap
3M certified digital printer since 1997
Their name or a blank label on the box
Your logo on the packing slip, your name on the return address, nothing of ours anywhere
You get a support ticket
You get the owner. Charles Platon has run this company since 1989
Volume spikes and quality drops
Grand format runs for national retail chains. Your busiest week isn't our busiest week
Cheap printing is easy to find. A printer who's been getting photographs right since 1952, and who'll never let your client know we exist, is not.
In 1999 we threw out the chemicals. It saved our customers money.
Most print shops were still running wet photo processes. We shut every one of them down and never went back.
Two reasons. The first was the obvious one. Wet processing is hard on the environment and it puts volatile organic compounds into the air. The second reason is the one you care about. Eco friendly print materials cost less to buy and less to ship, and we pass that down.
It also means no VOCs coming off the banner you hang in a school gym or stake into a field where kids are playing. We made that call back in 1999, long before anyone was asking us to.
“The image quality on banners is excellent. The colors are vibrant. The ordering process is easy and delivery is quick.”
VSP Brand Ambassador – Owner of Champion City Photography
Member SPAC, PPA, PPO.
Teaches volume workflow at PPA's Imaging USA
You order banners. Look at what's behind them.
You'll only ever buy six products from us. But the plant those six products come out of does a lot more, and that's the part that protects your deadline when October gets ugly.
- Digital output
- Die cutting
- Lamination
- Nationwide installation
- Fulfillment
- Design
- Project management
The equipment and the materials have changed a dozen times since 1952. The habit of buying whatever gets the job right hasn't.
Put a seventy year old print shop behind your name.
Membership is free. Pricing runs about 70% below retail. Orders ship in 48 hours in packaging that never mentions us.
Takes less than a minute
Rather talk it through? Call 888-966-9410, Monday through Friday, 9am to 6pm EST.