Nazdar: Toasting 100 Years of Success!

Ideas born over a cold one aren’t to be taken seriously are they? Well, they are when you’re talking about John Pottage Sr. and Ed Owens. On a blustery Chicago night in 1922, the pair sat together enjoying a beer at their favorite Bohemian bar, ruminating about their futures. When the conversation turned to a unique and obscure decorative process known as screen printing, they hit upon an idea: starting a company to provide screen printing ink.

Immediately, Pottage committed $1000 to the venture, and the conversation shifted to naming the enterprise. As they contemplated this question, they noticed a coaster on the bar imprinted with the word “Nazdrovia,” the Bohemian word for success. Today – and 100 years and millions of dollars later- these events have grown into Nazdar, North America’s largest screen-printing ink manufacturer and one of the largest of all ink companies in the nation.

Although Pottage and Owens dreamed up Naz-Dar (which lost the hyphen years later, after several name transitions), they had li