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…
Being a big baseball fan I was thrilled to work in perhaps the best defensive game ever played into an inkkitchen.com post. Jo Adell robbed three home runs, catching three balls headed over the fence and preserving a 1-0 victory. This isn’t some Madden video BS, this is some real flesh and blood stuff. This…
You’ve probably seen the headline: one AI-generated email costs a whole bottle of water. It’s a stat that gets clicks. But the real picture of AI water consumption is more nuanced, and the question of what you can do about it deserves a straight answer. The Big Picture Is Alarming U.S. data centers consumed roughly…
In 2023, Serge Ramirez of Supacolor stood in front of a Shop Talk audience at Impressions Expo and laid out his digital content playbook. Stop copying other people’s ideas. Go vertical. Take it easy on hashtags. Don’t be fake. Lean into user-generated content. It was sharp, practical advice, and every bit of it still holds.…
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…
