_____
Ludwick “Dooley” Knecht was born on the Mississippi gulf coast in 1920. After serving in the United State Marine Corps in the late 1930s, he worked for Higgins Industries in New Orleans, building their iconic amphibious landing craft that was widely used in World War II. After the war, he was hired by a local screen-printing company, where he learned the trade he would use for the rest of his career. He later relocated to Memphis, Tennessee to work for another printing business.
The Dooley Company was founded in 1962 in Olive Branch, Mississippi. The business began in a bedroom before growing to a detached garage in the historic Maywood community of Olive Branch. Initially Dooley printed on all types of products including posters, bicycle seats and plastic bottles. Holiday Inn, the Memphis based hotel chain, hired him to print posters and the plastic cups used in their hotel rooms. He soon began marketing custom printed drinkware directly to Greek organizations on college campuses throughout the country.
In the early 1970s, Dooley befriended Steve Slack of Marquis Specialty Advertising. A PPAI Hall of Fame inductee, Steve was one of the true founding fathers of the modern promotional products industry. Due to this friendship and mentoring, Dooley stopped marketing directly to end users and fully embraced the supplier-distributor model of the Promotional Products industry. The Dooley Company has since been 100% committed to selling and marketing ONLY to promotional product distributors. As the company grew, Dooley eventually built a factory in an industrial park that we still call home.
Dooley retired in 1990 and sold the business to his son Jim and daughter Janice, who guided the company for over 30 years. In 2022, the company was sold to Jim’s youngest son Nolan, who works alongside his brother Phillip. At The Dooley Company, being a ”family” business extends to our production team as well. Many of our employees have family members (sisters, brothers, cousins, mothers, daughters) that they count as coworkers. We are lucky to have two different pairs of siblings who have each been Dooley employees for almost 40 years.
While we use many technological advancements to make us better and more efficient, it is these devoted team members that allow us to remain guided by decidedly old-fashioned notions of quality and service. We look forward to serving your clients' next drinkware needs.
