Grand Rapids, Minnesota, is Itasca County’s county seat. This very small city started out as a logging town, as the city’s position on the Mississippi river made it an ideal location for shipping logs downriver to the more populated areas of the country. Although most of the wood cut in the area went downriver, some was kept in Grand Rapids to feed the local paper mill. Paper would continue as an important industry here – in both its production as well as its use by printing companies in Grand Rapids.
Today, the economy of Grand Rapids depends a lot on tourism, mostly of the sport and recreational variety. People come here to enjoy the mild summers, where they can play golf on one of the four local golf courses or fish in the area’s numerous lakes. While some people come up for a week or two, many people own or rent second homes here and spend whole summers in Grand Rapids. In autumn, when the summer residents pack up, another influx of visitors arrive for hunting season.
Adapting to a part-time population requires different marketing and advertising techniques than with a static population. New businesses can have a particularly difficult time getting started, since so much depends on being noticed by and making an impression on a population that may only be in town a few weeks. For this reason, start-up businesses rely even more heavily on printing companies in Grand Rapids than do the more established companies.
