What’s the secret to staying in business for 140 years? For Gallup Map Co., it’s listening to customers and producing the very best version of what they want, owner Pat Carroll said.

Case in point: Until 2008, one of the company’s best sellers was its Kansas City street atlas. Sales began to sink because the biggest buyers—companies in the building trades—were the hardest hit during the Great Recession.

At the same time, the entire paper-map industry faced tough new competition from Google Maps and other online services.

Carroll, whose parents bought Gallup Map in 1967, realized that a lot of people still loved the beauty of his company’s maps—so much so that they would love to have one framed and hung in their home or office.

“During that 2008 downturn, I had to adapt,” Carroll said, “and what we do now, we do maps as art.”

While Gallup Map still sells its street atlas and produces wall maps, it also makes a line of high-quality, framed reproductions of historical maps.

Customers can buy “honor maps” of the country where their family originated, including the name of the first ancestor to come to America. Clients with lake homes love Gallup’s maps of Lake of the Ozarks, Table Rock Lake, Lake Tahoe and dozens of other bodies of water.

“Our product is really, really good,” Carroll said, “and that’s why people like it.”