Fire Update 10/20/2025
New Building! New Look! New Equipment! Same Company!
New Building
It is with gratitude that we prepare to fully move into our new building, located at 4974 East Main Street, Batavia NY. We have been working over the past several months on purchasing new equipment, inventory, supplies, tools, etc. Everything we need to outfit a new shop. Meanwhile, the contractor has been working tirelessly to complete everything our new-to-us building needs – which is basically everything except the floor and roof! The former Tractor Supply building got a major facelift with new siding, interior walls, plumbing, heating/AC, wiring, ceilings, flooring, doors, you name it. A huge Thanks to the incredible crew at Watson Construction Group for pulling this off for us under pressure!
We will move into the new building in phases, but all packages and mail can be delivered to the new address effective immediately. Our production team will be starting there, followed by our office staff in coming months. We are excited to turn a new page and will be planning an Open House to share our new location – stay tuned!
New Look
Prior to the fire, we had been considering refreshing our logo, and now that we are undergoing so many other changes, we thought it would be fitting to roll out our new brand. This new look incorporates a graphic that hints at a bi-directional flame, symbolizing that the fire brought us both positive and negative outcomes, all of which will shape our company as we move forward.
New Equipment
While we are preparing to move our production facility into our permanent new space, we have had to make some decisions on what production processes/capabilities to continue with. We will no longer be offering photoengraving (dies). If you are looking for a referral to a new vendor for dies, please reach out to our team and we will send you contact information. The rest of our equipment list is going to resemble what we had before, however we will be adding to our capabilities over time.
Becky Almeter,
President
beckya@hodginsengraving.com
Fire Update 8/22/25
It’s been a while since the last update, and so much has happened during that time. I kept feeling like there wasn’t enough solid information to write a post yet, but at this point, there is! I am excited to share that we have committed to purchasing a new building in Batavia. The building requires extensive renovations, and is going to be under construction for a while yet. We are working on obtaining equipment and have compiled several presses and other finishing equipment. We will set up in the new space in phases, adding capabilities and expanding our capacity a little at a time. While we continue working through a vendor network to fulfill orders, we will start to transition production to our new facility over the course of several months. Please stay tuned for further updates.
Becky Almeter,
President
beckya@hodginsengraving.com
Update Regarding Fire and Current Status 5/27/25
The team at Hodgins Engraving has been set up and working in our new office space that we leased 4 days after the fire. We have our full customer service, pre-press and accounting teams in place. We have been working with other printers and vendors to fulfill our customers’ orders. While we have lost some business, the dedication, commitment and patience of many of our customers has been overwhelmingly heartwarming in this difficult time.
During the process of speaking with other printers, finishers, material suppliers, service providers, people in warehousing and fulfillment, etc., I am learning more about our wider industry than I would have otherwise. Combined with learning from our customers what is most important to them and how we play a role in their business, it has become clear that we have a very viable future in this industry if we rebuild our print shop.
Over the past three weeks, it has been eye opening realizing just how much work we had on our floor at the time of the fire. Our team has put in countless hours to manage sourcing that work the best we can. I want to recognize the folks that have been hard at work on the front lines with customers and vendors as well as behind the scenes with prepress and accounting. Our customer service team includes Michelle, Dawn, Kathleen N. and Amy. Pre-press is Diane and Kathleen D. Accounting is Karen and Dana. These hard working, dedicated people have been keeping Hodgins Engraving going these past three weeks, while running purely on grit, caffeine and optimism about our future!
While we are busy in the office, our management team has been working on securing a new production facility and equipment. This will take some time, but we are excited about outfitting a new print shop and getting the ink flowing again!
Thank you and please feel free to reach out to me directly with any questions.
Becky Almeter,
President
beckya@hodginsengraving.com
Next Steps On & After Friday 5/9/25
- Restore Pre-Press Operations – creating artwork files, proofs, and outputting files for production. Please keep in mind that we will have a week of emails and orders to work through so please extend your patience with pre-press needs.
- Restore our full customer service team
- Inventory will begin to be accounted for and replenished, including customer owned finished goods and fulfillment items, special order stock and envelopes that we held in inventory for customer specific needs, pre-printed items in our warehouse for customer order fulfillment, and masters/shells.
- Restore our AR and AP operations
Already in Place as of 5/8/25
- We have secured a new office, located at 26 Harvester Ave, 2nd Floor, Batavia NY 14020. While we also have warehouse space available in our new location, please do not ship any items to this location until further notice. Please continue to send mail to our previous address until further notice.
- We have met with several local printers and print finishers to make plans for sourcing orders.
- We have started the process of documenting what inventory we had in the building, prioritizing what needs to be replaced ASAP to fulfill orders, and beginning claims.
- We have our phone routing to voicemail, with the request that customers send all communication to orders@hodginsengraving.com until further notice. We have a small team monitoring the emails and replying as quickly as we can. Our goal is to respond to each email as it comes in, with information as it becomes available.
- We have partial access to artwork files, order information, inventory, customer and billing information. We expect full access by Friday 5/9/25.
News from Becky Almeter, President of Hodgins Engraving
I am deeply saddened to report that we had a fire in our facility on Friday, May 2nd. While we are beyond grateful that all of our employees and all first responders on the scene were uninjured, the building suffered debilitating damage.
Since then, our management team has been working non-stop to restore operations as much as possible. The impact of this tragedy is deep for our Hodgins Engraving employee family, our community and customers, however we are intently focused on action we can take to move forward.
Our IT company has worked since they knew of the incident, to make sure our data and systems were backed up and started offsite restoration immediately. They’ve been working non-stop on this and for their efforts, we had partial access to our system within days, and anticipate having complete access and be fully operational by the end of the week (5/9/25). Their efforts have been incredible, and their quick and complete response has allowed our business to become more operational by the hour and by the day.
In order to provide our customers with updates on what to expect from us, I’ll outline our plan for operations and continue to update this page as we rebuild.
How We Are Handling Orders That Were in Our Facility When the Fire Occurred
My husband, Jeremy Almeter who manages all of our production and myself, met with several industry partners on Monday 5/5 to tour plants and talk through details of their operations. We have a very close connection with many other printers, print finishers and specialty print operators in our industry, and we will need to rely on them for production for the immediate time being.
We were able to get a list of all orders in production at the time of the fire, and have been working non-stop to decide the course of action on a case-by-case basis.
- We are no longer going to be producing or sourcing production of rubber stamps, engraved signs, name tags, or embossing seals. Thank you to all of our long-time customers who have ordered these items for us for decades.
- We are no longer producing dies (photoengraving, plates, etching). We will be happy to help you source dies to a trusted vendor. Contact us at pe@hodginsengraving.com to discuss.
- We are triaging the work that is most time-sensitive to source production immediately to another vendor, including items that were rush jobs or that have specific deadlines, inventory that takes the longest to replenish, etc. We have been working with reduced capacity to handle orders due to having partial access to our computer system since Monday, however starting Friday 5/8 we will have our full customer service team operational, with full access to our system and artwork files.
I will continue to post updates to keep customers informed. We are working tirelessly to rebuild, and make progress each hour and each day. I have been overwhelmed by the resilience and support from our employees (who are our family), in the aftermath of this tragedy. Our team’s strength, combined with the outpouring of support from our industry and our community, will let us persevere, and we continue to rebuild what has been our families’ pride and joy for three generations.