At PRINTING United in Las Vegas, I talked with two companies chasing the same goal: DTF without the powder. Steve Harpold of Brown Manufacturing Group showed me the Yet-Tee, running DuPont’s jettable adhesive. Dave Blake of DCC Group showed me the Neo Flex, with the adhesive built into the ink. Same concept, different tech. Here’s…
SMEme adds a reasoning layer to the AI chatbot you already use. A human expert builds a decision tree and writes the questions, branches, and outcomes in plain language. SMEme compiles that tree into logic and hands it to a constraint solver. When a case comes in, the chatbot finds the facts in your files…
Recently our shop Mirror Image printed a seven color print for Farm Aid. Farm Aid is a nonprofit started in 1985 by Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp to help family farmers who were losing their land during the farm crisis. Dave Matthews later joined its board. Its best-known event is the annual benefit…
At PRINTING United in Las Vegas, I stood at the DuPont booth with Steve Harpold of Brown Manufacturing Group. He walked me through the Yet-Tee, an automated DTF line. This year it runs DuPont’s Artistri JA1100 Jettable Adhesive. The goal, in his words, is a one-operator process. Here’s the rundown, and how it differs from…
I went to Printing United in September to find out where AI actually is in the workflow tools, so far its Software that doesn’t remember. I stopped at a booth selling print workflow software to the paper printing industry. The rep walked me through it. What it does The software sits between the customer’s file…
This is a Throwback Thursday and a little bit of Fahrenheit AI AI generative art. In April 2025, Apparelist published my article, AI Generative Art in 2025: Integration, Ethics, and Originality. This year, The Academy membership selected it as the overall 2026 Dave Swormstedt Sr. Memorial Award winner. It also won Best-in-Class for Apparel Textile…
Karen Hao asked John Borthwick at CUNY whether we are in an AI bubble, and he said “absolutely.” Borthwick runs Betaworks and has lived through two of these cycles already. He calls this a productive bubble, like the railroads or the fiber buildout: too much money goes in, things break, and the survivors inherit the…
TBT: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Fast Growth — What Fifteen Years of Shop Talk Says In December 2024, Pam Ikegami published The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Fast Growth in Screen Printing, a profile of Vlad Kalman at Printing on Main Street. $3,500 in sales in 2019. Around $320,000…
Karen Hao has one line I keep coming back to. “AI is like the word transportation,” she told Mishal Husain on Bloomberg. “Transportation refers to everything from bicycles to rockets.” ChatGPT is a rocket. It costs a fortune to build, it eats land and water and power, and, as she put it, “we never go…
TBT: Crows and Shiny Things: Eight Rules, Fifteen Years of Evidence In April 2015, Rick Roth published Crows and People Like Shiny Things… It came out of a Cambridge shop near MIT, a reflective company down the street called Reflective Technologies, and a production manager named Aaron who summed up an entire product category in…
