Paul Orfalea, whose nickname was "Kinko" because of his
curly hair, founded the company as Kinko's in 1970. Its first copy shop, which Orfalea opened with a sidewalk copy machine, was in the college community of
Isla Vista, California, next to the campus of the
University of California, Santa Barbara. He left the company in 2000, following a dispute with the investment firm
Clayton, Dubilier & Rice ("CDR"), to which he had sold a large stake in the company three years earlier. Kinko's played a significant role in the development of American
counterculture in the 1980s and 1990s. In her study of the role of
xerography in
urban cultures in this period, the
anthropologist Kate Eichhorn recounts: ,
Canada Orfalea wrote in his autobiography that disentangling him from Kinko's took enormous effort from the
lawyers at
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. The problem was that rather than adopt the traditional
franchising model (by which the promoter creates a corporation that sells franchises), he had built the company as a series of loosely connected
personal partnerships between each store owner and himself. By 1997, he had established over 127 Kinko's partnerships. All had to be carefully dismantled and rolled into a single
S corporation to convert the company to a more centralized corporate-owned business model. Orfalea and several other key partners believed doing so would decrease time Orfalea spent mediating disputes between different factions of Kinko's partnerships and enable the oldest partners to cash out smoothly and transition to a new generation of managers. However, the new structure also made it easier for CDR to gradually force him out of his own company. Kinko's corporate headquarters was in
Ventura, California for many years, but in 2002, the company relocated to the
Galleria Towers in
Dallas, Texas. In February 2004,
FedEx bought Kinko's for $2.4 billion, which then became known as FedEx Kinko's Office and Print Centers. Prior to the FedEx acquisition, most Kinko's stores were open 24 hours a day. After the acquisition, FedEx reduced the hours for many locations. On June 2, 2008, FedEx announced that they were re-branding FedEx Kinko's as FedEx Office, the retail branch of the FedEx Corporation. Some stores and branding still showed FedEx Kinko's signage until summer 2010. To ease customer confusion during the transition period, many stores displayed a large purple sign in the window that said "Kinko's Printing Inside." Brian Phillips is the president and chief executive officer, following
Ken May's departure on March 7, 2008. The company's primary clientele are small business and home office clients. According to the company, it has approximately 2,200 operating facilities. With over $2 billion in revenues, the company is the 7th largest
printing company in North America. The company's primary competitors in the crowded North American market include
The UPS Store,
Office Depot/
OfficeMax,
AlphaGraphics,
Staples,
Sir Speedy, and
Vistaprint. Kinko's pursued an international expansion strategy during the boom years of the 1990s and early 2000s. Countries hosting FedEx Office centers outside the U.S. include
Kuwait,
Lebanon, and the
United Arab Emirates. Kinko's formerly operated in
Australia,
Mexico, and the
Netherlands but withdrew from those markets in late 2008 due to low demand. During the
Great Recession, FedEx Office withdrew from
China,
Japan,
South Korea and the
United Kingdom.
Konica Minolta bought the Japanese and South Korean operations from FedEx. On July 24, 2017, FedEx announced that its 24 Canadian stores, a manufacturing plant in Markham, Ontario, and its head office in Toronto, would be closing on August 18, 2017, after 32 years of operation with 214 employees being laid off. FedEx's Canadian shipping operations would continue, however. In March 2018, FedEx Office announced that it would open 500 stores inside of
Walmart locations throughout the U.S. On April 5, 2023, FedEx announced at its DRIVE Investor Event that it would consolidate its operating companies into one organization. This process was largely completed as of June 2024, with FedEx Office joining FedEx Freight, FedEx Dataworks, FedEx Custom Critical, FedEx Logistics,
FedEx Supply Chain, and
FedEx Express together under the
Federal Express Corporation{{cite web|title=FedEx Announces Planned Consolidation of Operating Companies ==References==