Here’s the rundown. Last week we revisited the screen side of water-based printing. Now let’s talk ink, because honestly, that’s where most of the old fear lives. Rewind to the UK in the late 1980s: plastisol barely existed there yet, so water-based wasn’t a choice. It was simply how you printed. Tony Palmer started in…
I attended the 2026 Decorator’s Apparel summit by Printing United in Nashville in the end of June, and this is an excerpt of Davis Slagle’s presentation The bottleneck is a person Every shop has a ‘person.’ The one you send the hard design to, the rep who just knows what closes. That knowledge never leaves…
Here’s the rundown. If you ran water-based ink a 20 years ago, you remember the heartbreak. You coated a screen, hardened it, waited a full day, and then watched it dissolve around print number ten. Pinholes everywhere. A razor blade and a sour mood for reclaim. Honestly, water-based earned its scary reputation the hard way.…
I think one of the hardest parts about using AI is getting used to how to interact with it and what it’s good at and what it’s not good at. °FAI: AI is good at two things IMO: Writing and understanding computer code, which is what gives it a lot of power. Mimic Social interaction.…
Most shop owners shopping the used market start in the wrong place. They open a tab, type in a brand, and start scrolling presses. Nicole Pape, the founder of Embellishr, a woman-owned dealer that appraises, inspects, tears down, and ships pre-owned equipment nationwide, says that’s backwards. On an episode of the Ink Kitchen’s Shop Talks…
I run six AI service. Claude for writing and code. OpenAI and Gemini. Ideogram to generate design work. Vectorizer AI to turn that art into clean vector files. Topaz Labs to upscale images. Every one of them charges me a different way, on a different day, through its own login. At the end of the…
Founder Mark Lane of Coed Naked, told the whole story at an Ink Kitchen Shop Talk, and it’s a masterclass in surviving the cycle. TBT: The Coed Naked Truth. Here’s the rundown. Lane bought the Coed Naked trademark, customer list, and artwork in 1990 for $15,000, started with roughly $46,000 in co-signed bank loans, and…
Anthropic shipped the most capable model it has ever released to the public on June 9. The government pulled it on June 12. Fable 5 Mythos and the USofA What Made Fable 5 a Jump Fable 5 is “Mythos-class,” a tier Anthropic puts above its Opus models. By Anthropic’s own benchmarks it landed at state-of-the-art…
How do you get your team to own projects instead of waiting for you to fix everything yourself? It’s one of the oldest headaches in the shop. In this Shop Talk, Rick Roth sits down with Ali Banholzer, who has built a system that turns “what’s broken” into completed projects, done by her team, not…
If you haven’t heard from us in a while or at all, it’s because of the thing I wrote about recently. An old automation that pushes °FAI to subscribers quietly broke. We kept publishing. You just stopped seeing it. The fix is in. The quarterly audit is on the calendar. While we’re here, let me…
