Kinko’s Acquires Vetco Building for Its Headquarters
Kinko’s Professional Publishing Co., a chain of 400 photocopying shops best known for operating 24-hour stores near college campuses, will move its headquarters from Santa Barbara to the vacant former home of Vetco Offshore in Ventura, company officials announced Wednesday.
About 150 employees, most of whom are employed by the 18-year-old company in Santa Barbara, will staff the Ventura headquarters. Kinko’s also is active in one-hour photo services, desk-top publishing, software publishing and office products.
The relocation, which is scheduled to be completed in 90 days, will bring to a close an 18-month search to find a tenant for the 122,000-square-foot facility, constructed in 1984, that became a West Ventura landmark. Vetco, a manufacturer of automated equipment for oil platforms, occupied the building for just 18 months before it was acquired by Connecticut-based Combustion Engineering in 1986.
Escrow is scheduled to close Friday on the $13.5 million transaction.
Ventura officials predicted the sale would boost the sagging oil-based economy of the west Ventura area.
“When you have a building like that sitting idle, then it drags down other businesses in the area,” said Everett Millais, Ventura’s community development director. “Even if the businesses are doing well, people think, ‘Oh, that area must be really depressed.’ ”
Real estate sales representatives complained that the gleaming stucco-and-glass facility at 255 W. Stanley Ave. had been a difficult sell because of its size, built-in furnishings and an unpartitioned office space, which allowed supervisors and lower-level employees to work side by side. The 25-acre site two miles from the intersection of the Ventura and Ojai freeways also includes a running track, baseball diamond and a locker room.
‘High-Tech Building’
“What you have is a high-tech building that was designed for engineering and administrative uses and not much else,” said Fred Ferro, an industrial properties specialist with the Oxnard office of the real estate firm of Grubb & Ellis.
He said the facility had been passed up by Chevron, an unidentified telecommunications company and California State University trustees, who had considered the facility as an interim site for Ventura County’s extension campus. Other plans had included carving up the building so that it could house a number of smaller businesses, Millais said.
But for Kinko’s, the facility complements the company’s philosophy, said Paul Orfalea, who founded the company as a college student with a single shop in Isla Vista. Fond of speaking metaphorically, the 40-year-old photocopy mogul has described Kinko’s as “a sort of Big Chill company,” a place where a new business generation can work efficiently as well as holistically.
“You put your hands into a triangle, and there’s the work part, the love part and the play part,” said Orfalea, whose curly hair earned him the nickname Kinko. “Here they all fit together.”
The building’s scarcity of separate offices also fit with Kinko’s egalitarian corporate culture, said company counsel David Douds.
“People are referred to as co-workers,” he said. “No one’s referred to as a boss, and there’s an emphasis on a family spirit.”
The company plans to build a 1,500- to 2,000-square-foot child- care facility and to expand the recreational facilities to include a tennis court and possibly a swimming pool, he said.
Company officials also cited Ventura’s large labor force and the city’s proximity to Santa Barbara, where most of the 150 workers who staff the headquarters live, as a reason for moving here.
“The commute from Santa Barbara is probably the most beautiful commute in the world,” Douds said.
Kinko’s had considered relocating to large cities in the West, including Seattle, Denver, San Diego, Austin and Houston, Orfalea said. Company officials had also considered erecting a new building in Goleta or Carpinteria, but they abandoned those plans when building restrictions proved too cumbersome, he said.
Cheap Land, Few Restrictions
Although Ventura is not actively recruiting Santa Barbara firms, many have recently considered relocating to Ventura and other cities in Ventura County because of cheaper land prices, looser building restrictions and an ample labor force, Millais said.
“Firms that are moving here are recognizing that a substantial number of their employees already reside in the area,” he said.
Millais said Kinko’s will represent only the second national headquarters of a major company in Ventura after Lost Arrow Corp., which owns the sporting goods manufacturer Patagonia. However, Ventura is home to the regional headquarters of several oil companies.
Kinko’s, which also has stores in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, has outgrown its leased headquarters on Santa Barbara’s State Street, which it has occupied since the mid-1970s.
“Right now we’re very cramped,” Orfalea said. “Sometimes two and three people share an office.”
The sale, which was negotiated for 14 months, was scheduled to coincide with the expiration of the lease.
A major sticking point had been the city approval for the extension of Stanley Avenue to the site. City officials two months ago approved the extension, which company officials said will be necessary for their expansion plans.
Kinko’s also will open a 4,000-square-foot copy shop, which will include a personnel training center, in a shopping center at Main Street and Ventura Avenue.
