Xuan Lee, holography specialist, is Hazen's Tom Brady, said company president John H. Hazen said. Watch video
HOLYOKE -- There is a team from New England that shines in the Super Bowl every year: Hazen Paper Co. of Holyoke.
The 93-year-old family business once again produced holographic images for the official in-stadium Super Bowl program. It will be sold at Super Bowl LII between the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.
Xuan Lee, holography specialist, is Hazen's Tom Brady, said company president John H. Hazen said.
In Hazen's basement holography lab, it's Lee who supervises the painstaking process of taking artwork and transforming it into a light-catching 3-D holographic image that can be reproduced repeatedly on Hazen's Envirofoil custom holographic recyclable cover stock paper. The artwork for the Patriots-Eagles program includes a graphic of the Lombardi Trophy, which is presented to the winner each year, the Roman numeral LII and the words "Super Bowl."
The Envirofoil paper is coated with a layer of shiny, silver-colored aluminum less than 1/20th as thick as a human hair. The metal layer is so thin, the amount of aluminum in one beverage container would cover a piece of paper the size of a football field.
The paper has so little aluminum on it, it can be recycled as paper by conventional means.
That's where the prisms are, Hazen said. Those prisms bend the light and make the image the eye sees as a 3-D image.
This is the 14th straight year Hazen has worked on the cover for the Super Bowl game program. The company's first program was Super Bowl XXXIX in 2004, which also featured the Patriots and the Eagles.
"The hologram gets brighter and more bold every year," Hazen said.
That's partially because Hazen's technology gets better every year, said Robert E. Hazen, executive vice president for sales and marketing. The graphics also get bolder and brighter because Hazen's client -- in this case the NFL -- is getting more comfortable with the technology.
The two Hazens are cousins.
John Hazen said the company moved heavily into holography starting in about 2004 as other paper and printing companies started downsizing.
"The technology is very involved, and that's where we saw the biggest barrier to entry for competitors. It's where we saw our niche," he said.
In just the last 10 years, Hazen has invested $25 million in its holography processes and created 100 jobs in Holyoke. The company has 200 employees here now. Hazen also has a warehouse operation with a few employees in the Housatonic village of Great Barrington.
Hazen makes holographic packaging -- movie studios with boxed sets of DVDs are big customers -- posters and lottery tickets in additon to book covers.
For the Super Bowl, Hazen's customers are the NFL and H.O. Zimman Inc., of Lynn, publishers of the program.
Final designs for the program are approved each year by about Christmas.
Hazen prepares the paper and adds the holographic images in time to ship the paper to a printer in Minnesota just after the Martin Luther King holiday.
Hazen ships the holographic paper in heated trucks so its pliable and ready for the presses as soon as it arrives.
Robert Hazen said no one else can complete the process in two weeks and do it all in house, utilizing the resources of just one company.
The printer completes the cover by adding a background image of the stadium, the team logos and some other text as well as the ads on the back cover and on the front and back inside covers. From there, the covers go to a separate company that prints the inside pages, and the whole book gets stitched together.
It costs $20 a copy, but this program is the in-stadium edition and available only at the game.