Our Story
It started because someone’s wife refused to move to New Jersey.
In the early eighties, Jose Lopez was a national parts manager for a copier manufacturer in Miami. The company closed its Miami operation and reopened the division in New Jersey. For months he flew back and forth, until his wife went up to look at it and came home with a firm answer.
So he made the other decision. He knew the copier business, he had a family in Miami, and in 1983 he started Barlop.
The first employee joined in 1984, and she still works here.
That single fact explains more about this company than anything else we can say. When you call, you're likely talking to someone who has been doing this job longer than most of our competitors have been in business.
The three daughters grew up in it. Summers spent scanning and doing data entry, dinner conversations about service calls, then every department in the building on the way up: reception, service, leasing, accounting. Today Monica runs sales, Michele runs marketing, and Mallory is the CFO. Jose retired in 2021, which is a technicality he doesn’t really observe.
The work changed underneath us more than once.
Analog copiers became digital. Digital added scanning. Scanning turned into document workflow. Somewhere in there we won a Miami-Dade County contract that put about 300 machines into service and grew the company enough that we had to take over more warehouse space to hold them all. In 2015 we bought the building we're in now.
That’s when we started the IT division, for a specific and slightly annoying reason. A customer would call and say the copier was broken. It usually wasn't the copier. It was the network. The IT company blamed us, we blamed the network, and the customer was stuck between two vendors who both had someone else to point at.
We didn't like being one of those vendors—so we became both.
That's the whole idea now. Copiers, printers, wide format, managed IT, cybersecurity, phones, cabling, document management. Not because a longer list is a better business, but because when everything in your office runs through one company, nobody gets to argue about whose fault it is.
