Lance Williams's Page

Test, test....is this thing on?

Well, hello there! My name is Lance Williams, as if you couldn't tell that from reading the profile title, but just in case... I'm the owner and founder of Avalon Innovations located in St Clairsville, Ohio.

Avalon actually started out as a side hobby business back in the early 90's. Oddly enough, we started out offering computer and biomedical comsulting services. Being a techie type, I quickly became involved in doing web development for some of my clients and friends. From there, people who needed web sites also needed printed items to go along with it, so I started doing print design work and brokering it all out. At some point, I grew tired of brokering everything out and being at someone else's production schedule, so I started to do some thinking (big trouble there). At first I looked at merging with another printing company I had done work with. Was there for about a year before I fully realized their equipment was junk and that they were in some serious fiscal issues! So, I decided to do it all myself!

So, in the early spring 2005 we started construction of our building. And yes I do me we. My father and I worked on every part of the building, well except for the concret and HVAC! Then in the winter of 2005/2006 we partially opened our doors. What do I mean by partially? Well, you see the building wasn't finished, but our clients wanted stuff! So, we started printing and doing drywall, and painting and what ever else needed done! It wasn't fun, but it got done...eventually!

We had decided to go all digital. With my techie and multimedia background, I had done a lot of variable data work for my old partners not to be, so we started off focusing on that. But things never seem to work out as planned. Around the same time I was talking with an old college room mate about a game idea he had. I told him that I would design it and get it printed if he actually finished the concept and rules! As we were starting to market the game and work with some of the distributors, I also started seeing what printing needs that they had. They all had one question in common, can you do books? I said no, but I'll look into it and soon after we were offering print on demand perfect bound books for the hobby games industry. We started off with a small table top perfect binder and have grown into a brand new Standard Horizen BQ-270 Binder.