A few years ago at an Impressions Expo Shop Talk, we sat down with Brett Bowden of Printed Threads and Pam Ikegami of Doing Good Merch to talk about adding online stores and fulfillment to a screen printing business. At the time, it was still a “should you or shouldn’t you” conversation. Some shops were…
Our weekly report was technically working. Every Monday it generated a PDF with setup times, delay breakdowns, operator stats, problem counts. The team opened it, scanned the numbers, moved on. Nothing changed. The problem wasn’t the data. It was the isolation. Setup time averaged 35 minutes this week, is that good or bad? Delays totaled…
We ran a post back in 2014 about a silkscreening nun named Sister Corita Kent. Her connection to screenprinting was mostly a footnote at the time—she had just popped up as a Google Doodle. Honestly, most of us didn’t know much about her. But the more you dig into Corita Kent’s screenprinting legacy, the more…
You’ve been asked to go to a trade show. Maybe you’re already sold on the business case, or maybe you’re still on the fence about the time and expense. There are lots of reasons to go to trade shows, and I’m telling you that Atlantic City gets a bad rap. One of my best friends…
The next stop on the Ink Kitchen annual poster printing tour is Atlantic City — this week, starting on Thursday, March 26–29 at the Atlantic City Convention Center. For those who haven’t been following along, here’s the short version: each year at the Impressions shows since 2020, we print limited-edition screen-printed posters live on the…
I run projects across multiple businesses, a screen printing company, a media organization and others. The action items live everywhere. In people’s heads, in transcript files, in meeting notes. Nowhere centralized. I needed to make something everyone on specific teams could access and edit from any device, no app installs, no logins. So I built…
A reader, James McCready, left a comment on our Hard-Won Wisdom post that deserves more than a reply in a comment box. He wrote: “If we’re being honest, pricing in our space is becoming a race to the bottom, and it’s hurting everyone.” He’s right. Custom screen printing in the U.S. is a $12.8 billion…
This year’s poster printing at the Impressions show in Long Beach did not go as planned. Not even close. And yet, thanks to the extraordinary generosity of our sponsors, we were able to donate $15,000 to Care Closet LBC — which for a charity with almost no overhead, does a great deal for homeless folks…
We have about 300 handwritten press log sheets sitting in binders. Every job that runs through the shop gets logged by hand, date, order number, screens, setup time, run time, comments. The problem isn’t the logging, the operators are thorough. The problem is that once it’s on paper, it’s dead. You can’t search it, you…
If you run a shop, you know this feeling. You invest time training someone, get them up to speed, build a rhythm, and then they’re gone. Research consistently shows that only about 30 percent of employees are truly engaged at work. That means 70 percent of the people on your floor could walk out tomorrow.…
