We hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend! In honor of the start of December, we are releasing our latest Gift Guide for your viewing pleasure! We took a different approach this year, by making a Children’s Gift Guide! Our Out-of-this-World Gift Guide for Kids is the perfect place to find presents for the kiddos in your life. It’s a collection of the most popular, unique and cheerful toys.

Our gift guide allows users to filter their search based on age and is broken down into three different sections: Educational Gifts, Unique Gifts and Magnificent Gifts (or the most popular gifts of the season). By using our bookmark feature, you can easily make your gift list and check it twice! Do you need help with ideas? Have the kids flip thru the guide (on any device!) to see if there is anything that peaks their interest and then they can bookmark those items as well! We have some product videos listed too, so that you can see what some gifts entail. You can even email their favorite items to yourself, just crop out the image you are looking for and send! Are the little ones wondering what is happening in the North Pole? Check it out by clicking on the Santa Hat to bring up Santa’s Village!

Once all of these new gifts are unwrapped, you might need to find a new home for your gently used toys. We have you covered, on the last page of our guide you will find several local options to rehome your past treasures.

The holidays wouldn’t be complete without a Gift Guide from your friends at Dirxion. This year’s guide was carefully crafted in our Compass interface by our Marketing and Production teams, showcasing some new features and design. We hope you enjoy the guide as much as we enjoyed building it! Feel free to share with family and friends who need some gift-spiration! 😉 

Until next year!
Happy Holidays from Dirxion

P.S. Like what you see? Give our sales team a call at 888.391.0202 or email us at sales@dirxion.com!

Nick thought he was being sneaky by only giving me one photo use!

Tell me a little bit about yourself.
I have an amazing wife, Julie, who puts up with me every day. And we have a beautiful baby girl, Annabelle.

How did you get started in production at Dirxion?
My Aunt Laura worked with Steve and Bruce at Southwestern Bell and after that, she started working at Dirxion. In 2004, I started off as summer help. A few years later, I started as full-time production.

What do you love most about working at Dirxion?
The awesome atmosphere around the office, Dirxion sports and fantastic health care.

What keeps you up at night?
Things that go bump in the night. (Ok, Nick is always trying to be the comedian at Dirxion {insert headshake}). All kidding aside, I sleep pretty well, occasionally Annabelle wakes us up. 

We try to stay active and fit here at Dirxion, what is your favorite workout to relieve stress?
I enjoy all of them! Although, I don’t play tennis due to softball being on the same day. If I had to choose, soccer is definitely my favorite Dirxion sport!

What do you like to do outside of work?
Spend time with my lovely wife and daughter. I like to play softball and occasionally brew beer when Julie allows 🙂 I also like to camp and fish.

What are you looking forward to most this year?
All of Annabelle’s firsts!

She’s also our Dirxion Mom!

Tell me a little bit about yourself.
I am known as the ‘Dirxion Mom’. So, the label totally gives away my AGE! I love summer, warm weather and dislike winter!

What do you love most about working at Dirxion?
The family atmosphere, the flexibility and our many healthy activities. (Thanks to our president, Steve Mitchener.)

What keeps you up at night?
I wish I knew. I have insomnia! Any advice?

We try to stay active and fit here at Dirxion, what is your favorite workout to relieve stress?
Walking outside helps me clear my mind!

What do you like to do outside of work?
I LOVE being with my family. I LOVE going to the Lake of the Ozarks to enjoy our cabin that has been in our family for 50 years. And LOVE, LOVE my one and only six-month-old granddaughter, Mia Ann.

What are you looking forward to most this year?
Spending a lot of time with Mia Ann and watching her grow, taking her to the Zoo, Grant’s Farm and many more fun exciting things/places for her to enjoy. Also, looking forward to vacationing in Jamaica in October.

Anything else you would like to add?
I would like to retire someday and live by the Ocean! I dream big.

The dirxion family is one of a kind! While our customers get to meet some of our wonderful employees there are a lot of great ones behind the scenes. Every month we’ll be interviewing one of our awesome employees so you can get to know the personal side of Dirxion.

This month we bring to you Mr. Mark Thomas! Mark is our Director of Sales. Surprisingly he went to school for accounting but ended up in sales, how does that happen?! Around the office Mark is usually on the phone with business, in a meeting, or briskly walking by my office to avoid any questions I might have 🙂 ok ok so all that is true but Mark is a really good sport with a wealth of information on all our product lines.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.
This question got skipped, this must have happened before morning coffee (see last question).

How did you get started in sales?
I have asked myself the same thing. How did I end up in sales. A painfully shy guy in high school who did best in accounting classes, but don’t tell my boss. When you end up selling copiers in the first job out of college, suddenly it was game on.

What do you love most about working at Dirxion?
Will this go on my review? It’s a little cliche, but it’s the people. I’ve developed some very tight relationships with both current and former colleagues. Oh yeah and the work/family balance. Definitely helps to be able to get the kids on the bus. Did I mention I have to go pick up the kids.

What keeps you up at night?
According to my FitBit quite a lot of stuff. I really associate with watching too much Walking Dead.

We try to stay active and fit here at Dirxion, what is your favorite workout to relieve stress?
If I was to pick one Dirxion activity it would be tennis. It’s a good mix of player levels so one week can be a relaxing outing and the next you’re running all over the court.

What do you like to do outside of work?
Primarily it’s family time. Personal time is spent brewing the occasional batch of beer, fishing with friends, and most recently getting back into mountain biking. You may think with a max elevation of 1772 ft it might be hard to find good trails, but Missouri has many great trails.

What are you looking forward to most this year?
We’ve started off the year with a flourish of new customers. Our updated Tear Pages platform should have a real impact with our customers. I’m excited to see how different types of publishers adapt Tear Pages to their needs.

Anything else you’d like to add:
Strong coffee makes me a more pleasant person

Do you ever regret your digital catalog choice? When publishers shop around, they often find inexpensive digital catalog interfaces that fail to exceed the average standards of a PDF flip-through. What follows is an inaccurate expectation that the digital catalog is not a selling tool, a moneymaker or a project worth their time.

A digital catalog, however, is not a chore; it is an investment. And Dirxion’s Compass shows its clients a higher standard.

Some of the top grossing industrial distributors in the world work with Dirxion to use Compass, which enables us to easily provide a digital catalog version for their distributors. Delivery is effortless since Compass converts easily to mobile, tablet & offline use, allowing sales users to access the digital catalog anywhere, anytime. Go in a new Dirxion, without the regrets.

It’s easy to get a hold of us, email us at sales@dirxion.com, call 888.391.0202 or fill out our contact form.

Are you still trying to figure out what to get your loved ones for the holidays? Well, look no further than the Dirxion 2011 Not So Essential Gift Guide.

Have you always wanted to give creative gifts, but just never had a chance to do your research? Or maybe you always forget about your pets during the holidays? We have just the gift giving ticket for you this year! Flip through our four-page flyer and get great gift ideas! Your friends and family will thank you for the awesome presents. Or they will just re-gift them next year. Either way, we hope you have a great holiday season!

Feel free to pass on to your friends…we know there are some last minute holiday shoppers out there!

We live in a time of instant gratification. Where one can find the information they need at the touch of their fingertips, in just a few minutes. How would you like it if your catalog could be easier and more convenient in finding the products your customers need, in a fast and efficient manner? Enter Lawson Products e-Catalog by Dirxion.

Lawson Products is an industrial distributor of more than 300,000 different maintenance and repair supplies. Lawson services the Industrial, Institutional, commercial and government markets in all 50 U.S. states, Canada and Puerto Rico with a convenient e-catalog solution from Dirxion.

Recently, Lawson sent out their newsletter featuring their new e-catalog. The table of contents will have you jumping for organizational joy, where finding products is no longer like finding a needle in a haystack. Lawson does a great job of color coding their product section tabs as well as using Product Call-Outs. Their virtual catalogs offer users a quick and convenient way to find the products they are looking for using Dirxion’s powerful search feature with linked part numbers and rollovers that include image and descriptions.

Check out Lawson Products digital catalog and see if your catalog could benefit from any of these advanced features.

Today is the one day out of the year dedicated to reminding us all to be more considerate of the Earth’s natural environment by unplugging electronics, fixing leaky faucets, and using green products. As a client of Dirxion, you may not be aware of the positive impact you’ve already been making the other 364 days of the year, just by publishing a version of your print for desktops, laptops, iPads and smartphones.  Here’s a quick reminder.

Last year you saved 532,500 square feet of preserved rain forest through our pledge to donate to the Arbor Day Foundation with each digital publication we produce!

Apart from our donations, at the time of writing this post you’ve contributed to saving approximately 19,033,163 pieces of paper from ever being produced and distributed, saving countless trees from being cut down. [See our real time pages saved ticker on our website]

You’ve saved harmful emissions from damaging the Earth’s atmosphere by delivering your publications through email, Google results, Facebook apps, on smartphones and iPads. You’ve  reduced the number of large trucks it takes to pass your physical publication on to smaller trucks and then divvied out to a colossal fleet of mail trucks.

You’ve saved a substantial amount of waste from piling up in landfills across the country, because when your reader is done with your publication they just push a delete button or we remove your publication from our servers.

For some of you, the environment was your primary motive in offering a digital publication. For other’s this is merely a side effect of your marketing efforts. Either way, it’s no secret that with print comes waste. We’re happy that our product helps, our excesses are nothing, and no matter what the driving force is,  we’re all doing a little good. And that is something to be proud of. Happy Earth Day!

P.S. If you’re not creating a digital publication yet, and need a little more added incentive, like our Facebook page for a special Earth Day promotion. You’ll makes some tree’s day.

Last week, Hometown Directories, Inc. placed an ad on the KFVS12 television station website. The results were nothing short of outstanding! Not only did they see a 55% increase in visits, Hometown Directories also captured a 13% increase in new visitors to their yellow pages digital edition.

For all you directory, newspaper, and travel guide publishers, let it be known that placing an ad on such high-traffic sites as as local news stations, newspapers, chambers of commerce, is a highly effective way to reach your target audience and gain some additional exposure!

Nice promotional effort, guys!

About Hometown Directories, Inc.
Hometown Directories is a Yellow Pages publisher that provides online access to the following printed directories: Cape Girardeau, MO & Sikeston Regional-Tri-County, MO.

Dirxion’s digital editions are very unique in the sense that we can create custom interfaces for most languages. So far, we’ve worked with clients that publish in the following languages:

} Portuguese
} French
} Spanish
} German
} Chinese
} Japanese

So when Samsung Techwin (a driving force in the development of Samsung’s precision machinery, image and optical businesses) came to Dirxion with a desire to convert their multi-language catalog into digital format to better reach their global distributors, we said “OKAY!”

Samsung’s distributor catalog is currently published in four different languages – English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish. Their hope was to have a separate landing page for each catalog that would direct these distributor clients to their respective catalog. They also wanted every piece of the interface from the buttons to the rollovers to the help section to be custom-fit for the distributor. In other words, they didn’t want to skip a beat.

The final result is everything that Samsung had hoped for in a digital publishing solution. In the words of Janet Fenner, Group Manager, Marketing at Samsung Techwin America:

“Not only does Dirxion provide a great product that has helped us grow revenue, but the service I receive from Dave George and the entire team is second to none. If you are looking at digital catalogs, I can’t recommend Dirxion enough.”

We love to hear the feedback and are thrilled to provide a product that can help increase sales for our clients worldwide!

We’ve included links to Samsung Techwin’s multi-lingual digital catalogs below, so you can better understand how digital publishing might translate into global business success for your content.

United States
http://www.samsungsecuritycatalog.com

Portuguese
http://www.samsungsecuritycatalog.com/portuguese

French
http://www.samsungsecuritycatalog.com/french

Spanish
http://www.samsungsecuritycatalog.com/spanish