Kinko’s Celebrates Its 25th Anniversary : Business: The company was called a ‘hippie print shop’ when it started but sprouted into a multinational corporate giant.

“From hippie to hi-tech,” proclaimed T-shirts that the more than 500 workers at Kinko’s Inc.’s Stanley Avenue headquarters wore Tuesday in honor of the company’s 25th anniversary.

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“It does exemplify how we started, but I don’t think I ever personally identified with that,” said Paul Orfalea, company founder. “I’m more of an idealist than a hippie or anything.”

The slogan is a reminder of the company’s humble beginnings in 1970 as that “hippie print shop in Santa Barbara, which Orfalea says was initially housed in a hamburger stand, to its present-day incarnation as a multinational corporate giant with 20,000 workers operating from shiny modern storefronts crammed with the latest business technology.

Video conferencing systems, high-speed color copying and computer services for small businesses have replaced the original black and white copies of college texts for students at UC Santa Barbara.

Slick, glossy brochures promulgating the all-business image have replaced the old irreverent ads in college newspapers that included cartoons of scantily clad women and one that used bathroom humor.

Kinko’s business strategy has evolved too.

“We look upon ourselves as a communication and technology company,” said company President Dan Frederickson. “How we do business, how we do work has changed . . . We think we’re bringing our culture, our society, a different way to work.”

True, several textbook publishers forced the change in Kinko’s business after winning a $1.9-million settlement against the company in a 1989 copyright infringement lawsuit. The publishers challenged Kinko’s innovation of customizing textbook anthologies for specific college courses. But the lofty aspirations Frederickson espouses jibes with the 1960s-flavored corporate culture personified by founder Orfalea.

At egalitarian Kinko’s, staffers are referred to as co-workers, not employees. Some 90 workers use the company’s expansive on-site day-care facility. Workers are eligible to receive loans up to $15,000 to use as a down payment on a home purchase.

“It pays big-time taking care of your people,” Orfalea said. “Their problems are your problems.”

Kinko’s apparently wants to take care of Ventura as well. City officials have embraced a development proposal that would allow Kinko’s to expand its offices, build more than 300 new townhomes and generally revitalize the city’s dilapidated western end.

Kinko’s officials are intent on bringing their kindly vision to the sometimes less than kind world of business. Their idea is to level the economic playing field by providing small businesses with technological resources similar to those that large corporations employ. The drive to offer inexpensive, efficient services, such as color photocopying, is referred to within the company as “the democratization of color.”

Indeed, Kinko’s appears committed to bring its Democratic business philosophy to the world.

The company, which has more than 800 stores, has branches in Canada, Japan and the Netherlands. Its first Korean store opens in Seoul in November. China is next, Orfalea said.

“We’re all one world,” he said. “We can become bigger. We can do to the eye the same as the phone company can do to the ear.”