Many people may not know that a soft-spoken artist residing in Glastonbury created the infallible adhesive lettering that appears on millions of sports jerseys.
When he isn’t busy living the life of a precocious “wizard” who has patented over a dozen inventions, Don Dressler has spent the past 10 years running Glastonbury Design, a fine-art reproduction business. He has approximately 300 clients across the United States and says he considers them among his closest friends.
“My customers range from their 80s to their 20s, but there’s no difference between them. They just want to create something beautiful with their art,” said Dressler, noting that he feels honored to help them reach their goals.
One of Dressler’s greatest joys in operating his business comes from helping artists realize that by “printing on demand” they can sell reprints of their work to customers who may not have as deep of pockets as a wealthy collector, but value the art just the same.
“Prints these days are becoming more and more legitimized. Otherwise, hardly anyone would be buying the expensive stuff in this economic climate,” he said. Dressler’s prints typically start at $75 and go up in price depending on the size. Sometimes customers start by printing a few of their pieces and then come back for more as soon as they sell.
Dressler says he derives great satisfaction out of helping his customers find a way to indefinitely preserve their art, so they can enjoy their images electronically for many years to come.
He says he still has on his computers images customers brought in many years ago. He learned the hard way, when he had a massive data malfunction, to always secure his clients’ images with many system backups so they never get erased.
Lately, Dressler has seen clients come to his shop on a tight budget.
“A father and son came in the other day with hardly any money to spend, but you could tell how much the dad believed in his son. I didn’t tell them I was reducing the price, I just did it for them,” he said.
Although Dressler loves talking about business, he pauses to mention that he takes equally profound pride in his inventions.
“I take things and make them into something totally different. You’d be surprised at what you can do with your ideas,” he said of his work. “I’m proud to say most of my products are still around 20 years later.”
Dressler believes that although a lot of people out there may have the ability to invent, they become consumed by aspirations of fame and money, forgetting the core of their passion. He considers himself to be the opposite.
But he has paid the price for it.
If he had listened to his lawyers and asked for the amount of money they told him to for his patents, he’d be a “millionaire” today, Dressler said.
As he glances at his printout from the U.S. Patent Collection online database, he notes that many artists have a problem with understanding the monetary value of their work.
As Dressler returns to his office full of prints and patents, he smiles humbly at the creativity he surrounds himself with.
There is no separation between his personal life and what he does for a living.
“If you love what you’re doing — like me — it’s great; but if you don’t, that’s just awful,” he said.g
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Joanna Smiley, a freelance writer from Collinsville, will periodically serve as a guest columnist for the Hartford Business Journal.
