John lives in South Hadley Massachusetts with his wife Gloria. John was born in Holyoke and attended grade school there and later in South Hadley. John is a 1985 graduate of The UMASS Amherst Isenberg School with a BS in Accounting. John worked for Arthur Andersen in Boston for 4 years as an auditor and ultimately a CPA.

In 1990 John joined the Hazen Paper Company as a sales person. Hazen was founded in Holyoke in 1925 by John N. Hazen. Hazen developed lines of embossed box papers and card stocks. John N. Hazen was an inventor and obtained patents and registered trademarks for his paper designs and brands. The Hazen Paper Company grew with brands like Shursheen and Phantom. Hazen developed Sheen embossings and this lead the company into foil lamination in the 1940’s.

The second generation of Hazen’s built on the foil lamination capability developing a number of markets and advancing the process. Polymer coating and color formulation became a specialty and Hazen built on its history of innovation and earned a worldwide reputation for high quality and reliability.

John H. Hazen and his team took the company into holography in the 1990’s. In the early phase Hazen outsourced holographic film and design and developed markets like trading and baseball card. Holography became a growing part of the business and in 2005 Hazen started its holographic lab in Holyoke. The holographic business really took off in 2007 and Hazen expanded the lab and set up its own in-house holographic production facility while continuing to expand its lamination capability in Massachusetts and in Indiana.

Tales from The Bunker is the story of Hazen’s expansion into Holography beginning in 2005. This was a “bet the farm” strategy for a family company in an old industrial city in New England. This is a story about technology acquisition and development married to old production infrastructure to transform an 80+ year old company that was getting a bit long in the tooth into a highly differentiated fast growing up and comer.