Usman Saeed, 26-year-old owner of Digital Copy Davis, spoke with The Aggie about the recent opening of his copy shop located on 920 Third St., Suite A.
The Aggie: When did Digital Copy Davis officially open in Davis?
Saeed: We opened on Jan. 1 of this year.
When and how was it founded?
About 12 years ago, my dad started the company, Digital Copy. It started as a family-owned business in Vallejo. We decided to start another store in Davis because it’s a small town and mainly because of the university. We could have opened one in Fairfield or Vacaville, but Davis looked like the perfect place because it’s not too small or too big.
Who are your current employees?
I’m the owner and there is a part-time employee who is a family member. We’re not looking for more employees at the moment because we’re still very brand new. When we start picking up business and more clients, we will hire.
How is business so far?
Business is pretty slow since we just opened up. For some neighboring shops, we have done some business for them. We’ve also had a couple of students come in to print out their textbooks. We’ve been doing a lot of marketing and advertising through the Yellow Pages, Facebook, Twitter and Yelp. We’re also getting ready to do a [mass] mailing.
What type of services do you provide?
How we set up the Davis shop is very student-friendly. We do high-speed copies, color copies, black-and-white copies, blueprints and business cards. We also do shipping for UPS and FedEx. It’s pretty much a very affordable Kinko’s. Whatever you can think of, we can do it.
How does Digital Copy Davis operate?
For big orders, we send it to the bigger shop in Vallejo and they ship it right back to us. For anything small, we can do it right in the store. Color copies are as low as 29 cents and go down to 19 cents. Black-and-white copies are as low as 4 cents. Business cards are $35 for 500 cards in black-and-white and $40 for 500 cards in color.
What is the current business plan you are pursuing?
Although there are other copy shops in Davis, we don’t want to put anyone out of business; we just want to help out in the community. We’d love to help out other copy shops. We’re promoting ourselves to be the most affordable shop in Davis since our goal is to serve the students and the school. We have the best prices in town and I think it’ll be really good for students to come and check us out.
What are your goals for Digital Copy Davis?
We hope students will do a little business with us and compare prices to other copy shops in Davis. We plan to do readers for UC Davis beginning next quarter and we’ll have the best prices on readers. Students can even be offered deals, like buy two readers and get one free. We also do price matching, so if students find a better price, we can match it. Basically, we want to get it out there that we’re the most affordable [copy] shop in Davis.
CLAIRE TAN can be reached at city@theaggie.org.
