Be authentic, or don’t bother A truth most shop owners learn the hard way: chasing markets you don’t actually understand is a fast track to burnout. In this live shoptalks form 2022, Milissa Clark runs her own print shop in Austin alongside her fiancé, and they’ve doubled down on music and merch because that’s the…
Most of what we cover in °FAI is the side-eye. Water consumption, sycophantic chatbots, the stuff that should make you skeptical. But fair is fair. While we’re busy critiquing AI in our industry and our daily lives, there are places where it’s doing measurable good for humanity right now. Healthcare leads the list. A 50-Year…
In 2015, Rick wrote about Google’s Project Jacquard and the “smart shirt” for battlefield wound detection. He predicted that computerized clothing was coming sooner than we imagined. Brian Peters dropped a comment noting that Google and Levi’s had already joined forces. Rick’s closing line: hold on, it’s coming. Computerized T-Shirts have Arrived. And it’s a…
Three years ago, somebody asked me if I really thought this AI thing was going to be the future. My answer: I don’t even think this is the future. I think this is the right now. Everybody is just going to wake up to it at their own rate. And Everybody’s Having Their Own AI…
Back in 2015 Rick got a scam email from “Ken” wanting to ship shirts to the Solomon Islands. No address, no phone number, broken English, and a credit card as the payment method. Rick’s advice was simple: if it’s too good to be true, it is. Delete it and move on. Phony orders scam screen…
My Downloads folder was a disaster. Screenshots piling up by the hundreds. Time tracking data I had to manually enter into two different spreadsheets every single day. None of it was hard. All of it was stealing time. So I began Automating daily computer tasks with AI. Downloads: Scheduled Cleanup The Downloads folder is the…
Back in 2014 Rick wrote that it’s not really a good excuse to plead ignorance about where your shirts are made. He linked to a Guardian story about feminist t-shirts allegedly produced by exploited women workers a precautionary tale about the gap between the message on the garment and the conditions behind it. Eleven years…
Rick was the inaugural guest on Raising the Stakes a new podcast hosted by Jed Seifert, co-founder of Stakes MFG, about the rise-and-give-back stories of people who use their businesses for something bigger. The conversation goes from printing his first shirts to save a building at Colgate, going $400K in debt and paying everyone back…
According to Harvard Business Review’s 2025 Gen AI Use Case Report, therapy and companionship is now the number one use case for generative AI, not coding, not content creation. People are processing grief, managing loneliness, and navigating mental health with chatbots. That demands a level of skepticism most users aren’t bringing to the conversation. It…
A couple of years ago at an Impressions Expo Shop Talk, we put Josh Ellsworth of STAHLS’/Transfer Express, Jody from Howard Sportswear, and Mark Bailey of SanMar on a panel to talk about the future of heat transfers. Josh dropped an analogy that stuck: the transfer is your frozen pizza, and the heat press is…
