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Lawrence Delesio serves as the Business Development Manager at DAF Products, where he specializes in providing digitally printable high-quality materials for Medium, Wide, and Grand Format platforms. He represents leading manufacturing partners such as DAF Products (Sign and Graphics) and Worthen Industries’ Fusion portfolio. With over 25 years of industry experience, Lawrence connects manufacturers, distributors, print service providers, and graphic buyers with the ideal printing materials tailored to their applications, leveraging his expertise in manufacturing, top coating, printing, color management, and installation.
In his role as Tekgraf Product Champion, Lawrence is responsible for the North American territory, managing channel relationships, prospecting new opportunities, engaging in competitive negotiations, and conducting partner field sales calls. His daily duties include overseeing product opportunities, availability, pricing, shipments, and addressing technical inquiries and concerns. Lawrence has successfully driven sales growth for Tekgraf Corporation, focusing on OEM digital printing solutions through value-added reseller channels, and has been instrumental in managing accounts for prominent brands such as 3M and Ilford.
Prior to his current roles, Lawrence was the Product Manager at Rexam Graphics / Intelicoat Technologies, where he handled the consumable media product line for wide-format digital printing. He excelled in building brand awareness through strategic product positioning, targeted advertising, industry partnerships, and vertical marketing. Lawrence was responsible for directing product development and commercialization, overseeing the product life-cycle for branded, private label, and OEM markets, and ensuring the successful introduction and management of new products in the market.
DAF Products, headquartered in Wyckoff, NJ, is a designer and supplier of wide-format and grand-format printable media, offering specialized and economical solutions to the print, graphics, and advertising industries since 1986. With warehouse locations across the United States and collaborations with top factories worldwide, DAF ensures the highest quality through its dedicated internal testing lab in NJ and quality-control center in Changzhou, China. Beyond signs and graphics, DAF’s diverse product lines include healthcare, tent and structure, automotive, aerospace, military, and pool industries.
Chris Santomassimo: Welcome back to the Think Factory Podcast. I’m your host Chris Santomassimo from OGC Solutions and we power the Think Factory podcast. And I’m here talking today with Larry Delesio, who’s the Business Development Manager from Daf Products. So welcome to the podcast.
Larry Delesio: Thank you, Chris.
Chris Santomassimo: So we’re both Jersey guys here. And so even though we’re on on a remote call doing the podcast, but almost neighbors, I suppose, right.
Larry Delesio: Yeah. The actually I’m in Connecticut, but DAF Products is based in Wyckoff, New Jersey, and has been there since the eighties. Yup. Yup. And I came aboard with these the folks at Daf, right around the financial crisis of 2008 2009. I was working at a a lot of people in the industry remember this company called Tech Graph and they were a distributor for HP of a lot of their hardware solutions and supported that and during the financial crisis and we’re getting into some history here. That company went out of business almost overnight with amazing thing and and I transitioned from there onto def products over around 2000 and 2009 2010 after that death product. So it’s getting on 14 years here.
Chris Santomassimo: Wow. Well, so what I was hoping to do today was introduce folks to the good stuff that’s happening at Def. But one of the things I like talking about with folks in the printing industry is just these long tenures of really cool experience. And I know you that that describes your career in the in the industry as well. So introduce everybody to yourself and then we can get into a little bit about that.
Larry Delesio: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I can’t believe you know how long I’ve been in the industry and time goes by. I did go to university for graphic arts and illustration in the eighties. I came out of school, I was a technical illustrator, did a lot of before the digital age hit, at least for the print side, did a lot of, you know, technical drawings of jet engines and flight controls and stuff for the Navy at a contractor went to a, ah, free press company. But my kind of, my big hire was in the mid nineties. I got hired at Wrexham Graphics and they were a big coding company in South Hadley, Mass with plants in Runcorn England, Wales, two plants in South Carolina, a sales office in Hong Kong. But they were doing a lot of the inkjet coatings for the OEMs like Hewlett Packard and in the day and CAD and laser master. And then we we also did all the electrostatic materials for three M in those days. So that was a an exciting time when you would walk into a trade show and I think it was probably Macworld or bold seminars back in the day, and you would go into the show and see a 36 inch printer imaging, full color graphics three feet by four or five feet and everybody scratching their head. How is this done? And that was the coatings on a lot of photo based and paper and certainly CAD materials. So I had a long I was an imaging specialist there, moved into product management as that company evolved. But, you know, there’s always these events that change careers and change industries and and that event when I was there was the dotcom bubble. We were up for sale from Wrexham Graph Racks and TLC, which is a probably at the time $4 billion conglomerate. They put us up for sale. The dotcom financial crisis hit before the housing crisis and they were going to sell us to I think it was 83 at the time and they pulled out of it. Financing was difficult and we got purchased by a group called Sun Capital Partners Private Equity out of Boca Raton, Florida. And that’s when a lot of the bright people started leaving that company. And I certainly moved on myself.
Chris Santomassimo: But you’re probably at the the front end of that that private equity interest in the industry.
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