There’s a particular kind of trust that only comes with time.
Not the kind you get from a Google ad or a five-star review from someone you’ve never met — but the kind that builds when a business shows up to the same community, does good work, and takes care of people year after year after year. For over five decades, that’s exactly what Allied Digital Printing has done right here in Huntsville, Alabama.
How it started
from humble beginnings
In January 1970, Jim Burruss opened a small business called Office Products Co. at 502 Pratt Ave in Huntsville. The pitch was straightforward: 3M copying machines, new and used, purchase or lease. He ran demonstrations in your office. If you needed copies, you called Jim.
Huntsville’s population was around 140,000 at the time. The Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts to the moon had just been built down the road at Marshall Space Flight Center. The city was growing fast, and it needed people who could put ink on paper and get it right.
That was Jim. And that was just the beginning.
By 1974, the business had outgrown its original name and address. On March 29, 1974, The Huntsville Times ran a brief item: “Office Products Co., of 502 Pratt Ave., has changed its name to Allied Photocopy Products and is now located in larger quarters at One Traylor Island.” Jim said the name change was to better reflect what they actually did — and that the new location gave them the space to do even more of it.
That’s the moment “Allied” was born.
Traylor island
Where Allied Found its Footing
If you’re a Huntsville native of a certain age, you remember Traylor Island.
It wasn’t actually an island in the traditional sense — more of a commercial enclave surrounded by a bend in Pinhook Creek, accessible by a small bridge off North Memorial Parkway. The bridge had a painted sign on it with two pointing hands: TRAYLOR ISLAND. Inside that loop of creek sat a ring of businesses, professional offices, and a roller skating rink that half of Huntsville’s kids probably laced up at least once.
Allied Photocopy set up shop there in 1974, and it was the right place at the right time. Through the mid-to-late ’70s, Allied grew rapidly — adding equipment, adding services, building a reputation for speed and quality that Huntsville’s business community noticed. Customers wrote letters to the newspaper about how Jim could run 1,000 copies in under five minutes. The Huntsville Times quoted a satisfied customer calling Allied’s Xerox 9200 “quite a miracle in itself.” Word traveled.
Jim added color copying. He added large-format reproduction for architects and engineers. He stayed open while you waited. He figured out what people needed and built the capability to deliver it — again and again.
But Traylor Island’s time was running out.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the construction of Interstate 565 began reshaping Huntsville’s Parkway corridor in a fundamental way. The new highway interchange at Memorial Parkway and I-565 required land — and Traylor Island was directly in its path. The bridge was severed. The creek-side businesses were displaced. Where a small commercial community once hummed with activity, concrete columns rose.
A 1978 aerial photograph shows the footprint of Traylor Island still intact, outlined in red, sitting just east of Wheeler Avenue and north of the railroad. By the time the interchange was complete, it was gone — swallowed by one of the most significant highway projects in Huntsville’s history.
Allied wasn’t going anywhere — not really.
University DR.
Putting Down New Roots
In March 1986, Allied moved to 1821 University Drive — the address it still calls home today.
An ad from March 1986 shows readers the new location
The move put the shop on one of Huntsville’s main commercial corridors, right in the path of the city’s continued growth, and gave Allied the space to keep expanding its capabilities as demand grew. Jim Burruss described it simply: larger facilities, better service.
And demand grew. Through the late ’80s and ’90s, Huntsville’s defense and aerospace corridor kept expanding. Government contractors needed professional print materials, signage programs, and direct mail capabilities. Cummings Research Park was becoming one of the largest research parks in the country, and the companies filling those offices needed branding, trade show graphics, and large-format displays. Allied built that capacity because customers asked for it — and because Jim would rather figure out how to do something right than send someone down the street.
By 1995, Allied had added the Xerox Docutech 135 — bringing electronic publishing and print-on-demand to Huntsville before most businesses even knew what that meant. Files from a floppy disk or a Syquest drive could now go directly to print at 600 DPI and 135 pages per minute. The industry was changing. Allied changed with it.
In 1998, the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce named Allied Photocopy the Small Business of the Year in the Business Services category. Jim — by then in his 28th year of running the company — said when they became finalists, they were shocked. When they won, they were even more surprised. Victor Burruss, who had grown up in the business and was now serving as vice president, said the biggest thing to come from winning was the name recognition. Customers who read about Allied in the paper started walking through the door.
A Dalmatian named Hunter helped with that too — Victor’s dog who lived at the shop on University Drive and occasionally wandered out front to greet customers alongside the staff. He made the newspaper in 1997. Clearly, good press runs in the family.
A New Chapter
and a fire that couldn't stop us
In 2005, Allied became a certified GSA contractor, opening the door to federal, state, and local government print work. That certification — GS-03F-0175W — isn’t easy to earn or maintain, and it speaks to the standards the company holds itself to on every job, government or otherwise.
By 2016, vehicle wraps had become one of the most effective forms of local advertising in the country, and Allied’s customers were asking. So Allied added custom vehicle wrap services — design, print, and installation — bringing the full process under one roof.
Then, in 2017, a large fire temporarily displaced Allied from its University Drive location.
For a lot of businesses, that’s the end of the story. For Allied, it was just another chapter. The work continued. The customers were taken care of. And in 2019, Allied reopened in a new and improved building at the same address — 1821 University Drive — because that’s where it belongs.
By 2021, the wrap side of the business had grown enough to warrant its own dedicated space, and Allied Custom Car Wraps moved to a larger location to give that team the room to do their best work.
Ribbon cutting ceremony for the Grand Re-opening, taken in front of the new and improved building for Allied Digital Printing following the fire in 2017
Family-Owned
Then & now
Jim Burruss started this company. Today, it’s owned and operated by his children, Victor Burruss and Natalie Burruss Tate — carrying forward what their father built with the same commitment to quality and community that started it all.
That continuity matters. Allied isn’t a franchise. We’re not a branch office of a national chain. There’s no corporate playbook dictating what we can and can’t do for you. When you call our shop, you’re talking to the people who actually do the work. When you need something turned around fast because your event is Saturday and it’s already Wednesday — we’re not submitting a ticket to a regional manager. We’re walking back to the production floor and figuring it out.
Family ownership means thinking in terms of decades, not quarters. We’re not optimizing for this month’s numbers at the expense of a relationship that’s lasted twenty years. The contractor who trusts us with their fleet wraps today might be the same company whose owner came in for business cards in the ’80s. That’s not an exaggeration — it’s just how Huntsville works. This is a city where relationships carry forward, and we’ve been here long enough to see that happen again and again.
What Huntsville Taught Us
Community Matters
Fifty-six years in one city teaches you things that no business seminar ever will.
We learned that the best marketing in the world doesn’t matter if the work isn’t right. In a city this connected, word travels fast — in both directions. A great job gets you a referral. A bad one gets you a reputation. We’ve built ours on the former.
We learned that technology is a tool, not a personality. Our HP Latex wide-format printers are remarkable, but they don’t make us who we are. The people running them do. The designer who catches a color shift before it goes to print. The installer who takes an extra hour to make sure a wrap seam falls where it should. The front counter conversation where we talk someone out of spending more than they need to. That’s Allied.
And we learned that showing up matters. Huntsville has been through booms and slowdowns, base realignment anxieties and unprecedented growth. Through all of it — through a fire that would have closed most businesses for good, and through an interstate that wiped out an entire Huntsville neighborhood to build its interchange — we’ve been right here, doing the same work, taking care of the same community.
What's next
built to last
Huntsville isn’t slowing down. The city is growing faster than it ever has — new neighborhoods, new businesses, new people discovering what those of us who’ve been here already know: this is a remarkable place to build something.
Allied is growing with it, the same way we always have. We’re investing in our digital capabilities, expanding our large format and signage services, and continuing to bring more of the production process in-house so we can control the quality from start to finish.
But the foundation stays the same. We’re a Huntsville print shop — founded by Jim Burruss as Office Products Co. in 1970, grown into Allied on Traylor Island, and still standing on University Drive under his children’s leadership — driven by the same four words that have carried us for fifty-six years:
