2023 Wide-Format Rising Star: Meagan Arizpe

Some people find themselves in the print industry because their families may have owned print operations, or they were taken under the wing of a print veteran — but that certainly isn’t the case for Meagan Arizpe.

Arizpe wound up printing because she responded to none other than a craigslist ad.

“It probably wasn’t the safest thing to do,” she jokes. “But I answered the ad, and it was for hands-on table work down in Texas. I got the job and just sort of hit the ground running from there.”

Fast forward 10 years later, and today, Arizpe is the graphic production manager for Chicago, Illinois-based Cushing where she’s responsible for prepping clients’ design files for production, operating the ADA machine, and managing quality control.

Arizpe says that when she first started down in Texas at Pace Graphics, she didn’t know anything about printing. In fact, she’d gone to school for animation, and she has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from The Art Institutes.

And how does one with a fine arts degree even sniff out a job in printing, you might ask? For Arizpe the answer is simple — she can’t sit still.

“I’m not good at sitting at a desk all day and sitting on your computer and being like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m just going to sit here and design things all day.’ I love to do that, but I have to be moving all the time,” Arizpe says.

So, when the opportunity presented itself to still be doing something creative that didn’t involve sitting at a desk, she took it and ran with it.

“When I first got in there, there was the owner, one installer, and one other guy, and I wanted to learn everything and get my hands on everything. Plus, I thought the printers were the coolest thing ever,” Arizpe says.

Over the course of a decade, Arizpe soaked everything up like a sponge. She worked her way up; learning her way through the printers, learning how to install, doing fabrications, and learning the CNC machines. She even worked her way up to general manager where she says she learned all the “ins and outs” of project management.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Arizpe says she ultimately wanted to be closer to her family back home in Illinois, and coincidentally, Cushing was hiring and looking to expand its wide-format segment.

“Just being here for a year, we’ve already expanded fabrication-wise and we’re doing custom ADA signage, and we’re building things basically from scratch,” Arizpe says. We have so much potential, and we have so much room to grow, and our team is really hungry and it’s really exciting.”

Making a Place For Herself In A Man’s World

Given that the print industry is male dominated, Arizpe shares she’s had her run-ins with misogyny more times than she’d like to admit. In fact, Arizpe says she got the job at Pace thanks to a quip between her and her at-the-time future boss who assumed she didn’t know how to use a drill or how to read a tape measure.

“I was almost a little insulted when I got the interview because it was assumed that one, I didn’t know any of those things. And from growing up in my background my mother taught me how to use all that,” Arizpe says. She recalls that when the assumption was made about her skills — or lack thereof — she replied with a sarcastic joke, which in turn led to her hiring.

Growing up in a single-parent household, Arizpe says that her mom stressed that you cannot depend on anybody but yourself and taught her “everything she needed to know.”

But in the end, even though it’s not ideal, she believes it has helped her grow stronger and pushed her to work even harder to come out on top.

“I think it helped me grow and understand there’s different dynamics in how people respond to certain things. It just really pushed me to be who I am today and how to respond to certain things and feel like I’m stronger for it,” Arizpe says. “I’m not good at following, I’m better at leading. And I want to be able to even show other people they can lead and do this as well.”

And because Meagan is a leader, she says her favorite thing about the print industry is being able to push the boundaries of machines to get the best results possible.

“I enjoy pushing the boundaries of the machines. I think that’s probably the coolest. Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ Watch me. I’m going to do it,” Arizpe says.