Over Sixty Years of Quality
It was 1945, the boys were coming home from the war. Looking for jobs, looking for ways to forget the vagaries of war. Muriel MacMillan was a young lady working at Woodwards department store in downtown Edmonton on the weekdays and out to football games with her boyfriend Bud Cowan on the weekends. She saw that at the games a lot of the men would make home made pennants to wave and support their team. A light went on and she went to the library to find out how to make them and talked to her boyfriend about how to sell them.
Bud was a natural artist and self promoter and could see the potential in what his girlfriend was proposing so he registered the company as the Cowan Crest Company and started printing pennants. Looking for more profitable products led them to such things as bronzing baby shoes, wooden wall hangings and printing on ties to name a few. This led to the Cowan company to finally focus on decals and markings which are now the majority of Cowan's work.
Above you see a photo from left to right of Bud Cowan, Phil Schwindt (sales manager), Don MacMillan (production foreman) and Harry Elliot (press operator). Hands on quality control back in 1957! Don MacMillan later went on to purchase the company with his wife Ruby and saw the company through the seventies.
To this day Cowan remains a family owned business with an emphasis of treating staff like partners through profit sharing and advancement within the company.