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…
If you’ve never read an encyclical, they’re fascinating. Pope Francis wrote a 2015 encyclical on the environment and climate change called Laudato si’. Its translated subtitle is “On Care for Our Common Home.” An encyclical is a glimpse into a mind that is revered and chosen by a large group of their peers to form…
Just for this week we are doing a bit of crossover into °FAI. It’s a topic I think is very important. Here’s the rundown. Episode 15 °FAI is the one where we ask the harder question about AI, who’s steering it? With Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical putting AI ethics on the front page, it’s…
Mirror Image had need for a CRM. So I started Building a CRM on Monday + Brevo. This is a new space for me to build in, and I’m using AI to assist. We tested HubSpot first and then arrived on the Monday / Brevo integration because it seemed to suit our needs better. Maybe…
From March 2020, Water-based ink scares a lot of shop owners, and not without reason. Plastisol forgives mistakes; water-based does not. So at Impressions Expo Long Beach 2020, we sat down with Tony Palmer of MHM, a UK printer who started in 1987 when water-based was the only ink in the room, for a no-theory,…
