The brand changed a few hands in its initial years, until it reached the passionate and able hands of its current flagship twenty years ago. Since then it has grown exponentially, operating out of 23 branches in Chennai, maintaining high quality of work and services to its customers.
They introduced the electrical typewriter of IBM in Chennai, then the electronic typewriter and then computers; they were one of the first to buy laser printer HP series 2 which was printing 8 pages per minute. The initial versions of the word processor used by them were Wordstar 2, Word 1 and Corel Draw 1. They have grown with technology, experimenting at every stage with new technological updates.
The progress of Students Xerox from the beginning was narrated by Sowri Rajan, the Director “Students Xerox started in the year 1978. I bought it as a sick unit with two employees, one photocopying machine and two typewriters in the year 1986 becoming the sixth owner. We were operating out of a 100 square feet area in Adyar, Chennai. We were pioneers in the concept of branding our unit and even when we had just one outlet we made the sea horse our logo which had several unique characteristics like swimming vertically, we also offered unique services at that point of time. We were transparent in working right in front of our customers. We distributed plastic bags with our logo to create awareness about Students Xerox. It took three years for the business to stabilise and then we started the second outlet. Over these two decades, we have successfully copied our systems and procedures into our 23 branches and we function with 300 employees and one of the old employees still remaining with us right through these two decades. To ensure that our culture is maintained uniformly, even today our new recruits have to undergo a training period in our Adyar outlet. The business is smoothly run by my father Mr. Arunachalam”.
They are the largest company in this industry in India and their work model has been studied by companies like Xerox, Canon and HP. They have won a lot of awards including the best employee employer relationship award from the rotary in 1993 which was previously won by reputed large organisations like the TVS and L&T.
Sowri Rajan was emphatic in stating, “The concept of paperless office has not affected us as the consumption of paper has gone up in our country. With expanding use of emails and web technology we have increased business from other countries like Singapore, Japan and Australia. Today, handling a huge workload is not an issue as we have laser printers that print 105 pages per minute. We also have an exclusive setup to cater to the services required for huge corporate organisations like Reliance, Standard Chartered, Airtel etc.”
Photocopying was done under staircases in the days when Students Xerox opened shop and today they are operating efficiently adopting the latest technology, wireless connectivity, all their branches connected through wide area networks and their billing totally computerised.
A journey from typewriter to electronic typewriters, laser printers printing 8 papers per minute to laser printers printing 105 papers per minute and the technologies of photo copying showcased the global migration of this industry all under one banner. Students Xerox is a definite revolution!
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