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Stuart Sellars, founder of Travel Graphics International, a map-making company, talks about his career in his Roseville office on Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025. The company is celebrating its 50th year in business. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
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Stuart Sellars, founder of Travel Graphics International, a map-making company, talks about his career in his Roseville office on Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025. The company is celebrating its 50th year in business. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
Bitten by the travel bug at an early age, Stuart Sellars has spent most of his life helping others with the same affliction get to where they want to go.
Born in England and trained as an engineer, Sellars is the founder and art director of St. Paul-area map-making company Travel Graphics International, which marked 50 years in business this week.
An impressive milestone in any industry, TGI weathered the Internet boom and the rise of GPS mapping with a custom illustrated, 3D map style that emphasizes major thoroughfares and prominent geographic and architectural landmarks.
Popular in the travel and hospitality industries, clients of TGI have ranged from visitors bureaus and chambers of commerce to the Four Seasons Hawaii and United Airlines. With more than 10 million maps distributed, if you’ve ever grabbed a map from a brochure rack, there’s a chance it’s one of theirs.
Founded in 1975 in Minneapolis with about $10,000, TGI wouldn’t reach its height until the mid-1990s when it did nearly $1.5 million in sales and relocated to Roseville as a home-based business. Nearly 30 years later, the business today is still finding ways to remain relevant and keep its maps in travelers’ hands.
Mapping a map: 1970s
When the company launched in 1975, it was the first of its kind in many ways, Sellars said.
Without Google Earth or satellite imaging, researching a city in order to document it was a monstrous task.
“I would charter a helicopter and fly over the downtown areas, strapped in and leaning out to take 200 to 300 photographs,” Sellars said. “Then I’d have to drive every street to match the aerial photographs with the buildings.”
Thousands of pieces of reference materials were needed to draw the maps in 1970s and 1980s, including aerial images from the newspaper, blueprints from the planning office, travel books and postcards, Sellars said.
At the time, an average hand-drawn map would cost $70,000 to $80,000 to create, Sellars said, with the lion’s share going to production and roughly $15,000 earmarked for research, including flights, room and board and onsite photographs.
“I tried every other way of doing it less expensively, but I found that you could not get the view that you needed,” he said.
Compiling the research usually took a few weeks, Sellars said, and the artist would then take two to three months to draw the map.
“That research was the key part,” Sellars said. “I think one of the reasons we really didn’t have competition for 20 years was because it was so expensive to produce.”
The little competition TGI did have, “We’d usually end up suing because they would trace our maps,” Sellars said.
Mapping a map: 2020s
Instead of hanging out of the side of a helicopter to snap a reference photo, TGI’s Illustrator Arkady Roytman consults Google Maps, Google Earth, social media and company websites.
Using Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, Roytman painstakingly crafts entire cities, one digital building at a time.
“I make an isometric grid, then I try to capture the essence of the building I am trying to illustrate,” Roytman said. “Using the photos and the reference material, I try to find a good face of the building, something distinct that somebody looking at the map could recognize.”
While the maps are accurate, they are not drawn to scale and certain liberties must be taken, Roytman explained. For example, a building might be rotated so its most recognizable features are apparent to a visitor.
Roytman, the company’s sole artist, earned a degree in sequential art, worked at several art galleries and illustrated coloring books before joining the mapping business in 2018.
“Their main concern was the unique style of the map,” Roytman said of his hiring. “They wanted someone who could mimic that style and that is one of my skills.”
Roytman likens the colorful, whimsical nature of the maps to Martin Handford’s “Where’s Waldo” and Spanish-Mexican-American cartoonist Sergio Aragones, known for creating the comic book “Groo the Wanderer.”
As opposed to the months it would take to draw a map in the 70s, Roytman said he can create a map from scratch in just weeks with certain projects taking only hours.
Most maps of the continental U.S. are printed at the John Roberts Co. in Coon Rapids and the company’s Hawaii maps are printed at Edward Enterprises in Honolulu, Sellars said.
Staying relevant
Throughout its 50 years in business, TGI needed to evolve in order to stay afloat.
What began as promotional poster maps of Hawaii, Mexico and the Caribbean would soon expand to maps of major U.S. cities and eventually grow to offer the now-ubiquitous map-brochure.
In 1979, TGI entered its first deal with United Airlines to supply maps of its major destinations. During the 1980s, the company researched and published maps of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, Phoenix, Orlando, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Antonio and Washington, D.C.
“What’s really cool about the business model is that he created these maps ages ago and he is still able to use them and customize them to each client,” Roytman said.
In the 1990s, the company created online versions of its illustrated maps and developed proprietary software that allowed businesses to customize its products for their customers. In the late 90s, TGI entered a deal with Hawaiian Airlines and its second deal with United Airlines to supply in-flight maps.
In more recent years, TGI created a map for Visit Inver Grove Heights, the city’s convention and visitors bureau.
“I was looking for a custom map to help promote hotels, sports facilities, restaurants and shopping to visitors,” said Eric Satre, former executive director for Visit Inver Grove Heights, in an email.
TGI was able to create a map that fit the bill and they were placed at hotels in the city as a way to connect visitors to local businesses, said Satre, who now works as the destination marketing manager for Destination: Woodbury.
Today, TGI’s maps include QR-linked digital versions that update in real time and a virtual concierge service, ConciergeMaps.com, that recommends activities and helps with reservations.
Jennifer Wedel, Sellars’ daughter, is currently working part-time for the company, helping to rebuild its Hawaii business. The company hopes to reopen its Honolulu office next year, which closed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks put a damper on travel.
“The maps and the way they’re enjoyed so much still by tourists, that’s always been an especially successful model and product in big tourist destinations like Hawaii,” said Wedel, who has worked full- and part-time for the company over the last decade. “It’s a natural place for us to work on rebuilding.”
TGI also has plans to offer territory-based equity distributorships so local entrepreneurs can own territory rights, sell ad space and share in map revenue.
False starts, mafia run-in
While it is the most successful of Sellars’ map companies, TGI was not the first nor the second.
Prior to TGI, Sellars worked for Vancouver-based Trans Continental Cartographers where he sold ad space for the vibrant, cartoon-style map maker.
When Trans Continental Cartographers went out of business, Sellars and three friends picked up where it left off with their new business, Inter Continental Cartographers. What seemed like a good idea at the time, it would unfold in ways Sellars never saw coming.
Sellars recounted a particular business trip in 1971 where, upon returning home to Vancouver, he discovered that members of the Canadian mafia had commandeered Inter Continental Cartographers due to unpaid debts by one of the co-owners.
As Sellars describes it: The organized crime cell planned to transport drugs into the U.S. by storing them in the rolled up maps inside of polyethylene tubes. The thinking at the time was that K9 units wouldn’t be able to detect the substances due to the tubing and the ink on the map, he said.
During this time, Sellars said he and his family were threatened and followed by a black limousine. Out of fear, he decided to send his family back to England, he said.
After alerting the Canadian authorities to their situation, Sellars and his business partners safely relocated to Toronto.
With Vancouver, and the mafia, behind him, Sellars would go on to have an ownership stake in map-making businesses Archar Inc., Archar Western Inc. and finally as the sole owner of Archar International Inc., which now does business as Travel Graphics International.
Looking for buyer
At 85 years old, Sellars is hoping to retire soon and pass the business on to a fellow traveler.
Sellars, who is the sole investor with 90% ownership of the company, said he has invested around $4 million into TGI since its founding. The other 10% of the company belongs to Paula Hylle, a longtime employee of TGI.
“I’ve never become wealthy in the business, but I’ve felt wealthy and I got to do things,” said Sellars, who has visited nearly 100 countries.
His home office in Roseville is proof of a life lived on the road: brochure maps strewn about, a floor globe in the corner, cartography-themed wallpaper and a bookshelf where each title lists a different country.
Of all the places he’s traveled, he said a safari in East Africa remains his favorite. Sites still on his list include Iceland, Greenland and parts of Central America.
When asked if he’d take the reins, Roytman said with a chuckle, “I’m happy to continue my role as the artist, but I don’t have the business acumen.”
Wedel isn’t interested in taking on the business either, she said. “I am in a part of my life where taking major business risks doesn’t align with my other responsibilities,” said the mother of a 13-year-old.
“It’s been a significant joy in my life that I’ve been able to work so closely with my dad. Most people don’t get that opportunity,” Wedel said.
While she wouldn’t take the company’s top spot, Wedel said she would “jump at the chance” to work as a salaried marketing director under new ownership.
As for Sellars, just because he wants out of the office doesn’t necessarily mean he’s out of the game.
“I’d love to stay involved and help someone else take over and be successful,” he said. “If the opportunity arose and there were more places to research — I’d go!”
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