PIP Brand Guidelines: Postal Instant Press, a 1965 California Name & Franchise Services

A commercial printing plant that opened its doors to walk-in work.

PIP is an American printing, signs and marketing franchise with its head office in Mission Viejo, California. The three letters began as an abbreviation. Franchise Times, in the Top 400 franchise ranking it published in September 2026, says the business was launched in 1964, when Bill LeVine converted a commercial printing plant into a retail printing centre. The company, originally known as Postal Press, changed its name to PIP, short for Postal Instant Press, in 1965, the magazine says, and began franchising in 1968.

The franchise directory of Entrepreneur gives the same outline in shorter form: founded in 1965 and franchising since 1968. Both put the start of the franchise system in 1968, three or four years after the first retail centre opened.

The name has been extended rather than replaced. For decades the brand was widely known as PIP Printing, the form English Wikipedia uses when it notes that a former president of PIP Printing, Catherine Monson, was named chief executive of the sign franchise Fastsigns in 2009. Today the brand trades as PIP Marketing, Signs, Print, the name under which both Entrepreneur and Franchise Times now list it. The initials stayed at the front; the words after them changed to describe a wider service.

That wider service is how the independent listings now describe the business. Franchise Times says PIP offers printed marketing materials, branded products, and web and social media marketing campaigns. Entrepreneur lists graphic design, printing, copying and finishing, together with document services such as scanning, archiving and document management.

One of three print brands under Franchise Services.

PIP is no longer independent. Franchise Times says the brand is owned by Franchise Services, Inc., which also owns Sir Speedy and Signal Graphics; Entrepreneur names the parent as Franchise Services LLC and lists Richard Lowe as president and chief executive. English Wikipedia says Sir Speedy, also founded in 1968, has its head office in Mission Viejo too, and that Richard Lowe was named its chief executive in February 2025. Two print brands from Southern California are now in the same group.

The network is smaller than the name’s long history might suggest. In its 2026 Top 400, Franchise Times counted 50 units, all of them in the United States and all of them franchised, with no international units. It ranked PIP 365th that year, against 359th the year before. Entrepreneur’s listing also gives 50 units.

Individual centres carry the brand in their own towns, often over many years. In May 2019 Alaska Business reported that the US Small Business Administration’s Alaska District had named the co-owners of PIP Printing of Alaska, in Anchorage, its 2019 Small Business Persons of the Year. The owners said they were then celebrating their 40th year of business, and the magazine said the business provided more than 40 jobs in the Anchorage area. The award, the magazine explained, recognises owners with at least three years of trading who show growth, staying power and contributions to their community.

The franchise system is built around training and shared services. Entrepreneur’s listing gives 120 hours of on-the-job training and 44 hours of classroom training for new owners, and lists ongoing support that includes field operations, proprietary software, a franchisee intranet, advertising templates, national media, search marketing and website development. It also says a PIP centre cannot be run from home, part time or by an absentee owner.

Sign, print and promotional franchises.

Sign, print and promotional-products franchises sell mostly to other businesses, through local centres run by franchisees under a shared name. Their identity is carried less by national advertising than by the surfaces the centres themselves produce: shop windows, vehicle wraps and reception displays. When Signarama renewed its colour scheme, logo, tagline and icon in 2014, Signs of the Times reported that the new look would be applied to exactly those three things across its franchise locations.

The photography such companies publish tends to show the same surfaces: storefronts with the brand name across the fascia, vans in full wraps, and finished signs installed on clients’ buildings, much of it carrying the client’s name rather than the franchise’s own. Individual centres are commonly identified by the town or district they serve, so one national name is repeated across hundreds of locations, and in some markets a network trades under a different name altogether, as FASTSIGNS does in Australia, where English Wikipedia says its centres operate as Signwave.

Service menus tend to be written plainly, as lists of what a centre can make and do: signs and banners, vehicle graphics, interior décor, wayfinding, digital signs, printed material and branded merchandise, often with design, permitting and installation alongside. The menus have widened over time; FASTSIGNS, which began with next-day cut-vinyl signs in 1985, now describes a much broader range of visual communications.

Behind the storefronts sit corporate pages about owners and franchise systems. Some networks belong to private-equity firms and have changed hands several times; others remain in family control, as the Titus family’s United Franchise Group does with Signarama. Location counts are given by date and by source, and they vary, because centres open, close, convert from independent shops or share premises with related franchises.

Initials first, services after.

PIP’s identity rests on its initials. The letters once stood for Postal Instant Press, a name built on that of the parent plant, Postal Press; the brand now places three plain service words after them: marketing, signs and print. That order matches the way the independent listings describe the modern business, in which printing sits alongside branded products, sign work, design and online campaigns.

The name also shows how a franchise brand of this age carries several layers at once. Postal Press was the plant, Postal Instant Press was the retail idea, PIP Printing is the long-standing form English Wikipedia uses, and PIP Marketing, Signs, Print is the current trading form. Local centres add a place, as in PIP Printing of Alaska, so the national initials and a town name appear together on the shop and its work.

Ownership has given the brand close neighbours. Under Franchise Services, Inc., PIP sits beside Sir Speedy, a print brand founded in the same year that PIP began franchising, and Signal Graphics, all within one group based in Mission Viejo, according to Franchise Times. Each keeps its own name, and Franchise Times ranks them as separate franchises.

The scale of the network is stated plainly in the rankings: 50 units in the United States in 2026, according to Franchise Times. The founding story, the 1965 name and the 1968 start of franchising are the parts of the history that the independent listings repeat.

For a design guide, PIP shows how a set of initials can outlast the words they stood for, with a plain list of services added after them. Compare Sir Speedy, its sister print brand under the same owner, and Minuteman Press, another US print franchise. For this guide we use a press blue, a bond-paper white and a toner amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PIP’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.