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…
We’ve been publishing since 2014. That’s twelve years of screen printing posts: techniques that turned into industry standards, characters worth re-introducing to a new generation of shop owners, and arguments about ink, pricing, and process that read like they were written this morning. What Throwback Thursday Is: Here’s the Rundown. The premise is simple. The…
I spent the last few weeks digging into why one of our automations wasn’t working. Nobody had touched it in years. That was the problem. The TROUBLE with Automations, Set It and Forget It Is a Lie. When I traced it back, the answer was simple. The platform had changed. The tags and filters the…
So I made some updates to the logs being used in production. You can check out the earlier development here and here. The problem, if someone doesn’t record reclaim sessions all week, we find out Friday when the weekly report runs. By then the week is gone. Accountability lived in the log but nothing was…
Back in September 2022, the Shop Talks stage handed us one of the more honest conversations we’ve run. Dennis Tam of Ampersand in Brooklyn sat down with Rick Roth to talk not about wins, but about regrets, what they’d do differently if they could start over. Dennis came to printing the long way: an NYU…
