The pioneering printer operated out of Saint Paul since 1967. Jorgensen family members, who launched and still own Impressions, first learned of space at Westgate at a dinner party attended by a Port Authority employee. The employee convinced them to look at Westgate as a work in progress because there were no roads. Yet, the site made an impression and the company, in 1990 became the first tenant in Westgate 1 where it still operates an 84,000-square-foot state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. The company specializes in full-scale, multicolor printing and packaging.

Dao Nguyen – Impressions Inc.

As the Port began the detailed work of cleaning up Westgate, Dao Nguyen and her family were escaping by boat from communist-occupied Vietnam. They survived the next one and a half years in a Malaysian refugee camp before relocating first to Hawaii and then, in August 1990, to Saint Paul. A friend from Vietnam talked about the opportunities in the East Metro. Nguyen studied graphic arts at St. Paul College and then landed a job at a small graphics company before joining Impressions’ staff in 1994. “I feel this work is very interactive; there is a lot of variety in what I do,” she said.