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.…
Every piece of artwork I generate for the shop goes through Ideogram (and a few other generators). Describe the image, remix or generate, reduce to four colors, prep for vectorization. Every time. Same steps, same suffix, same manual process. It works, but it doesn’t scale. So I built a pipeline that does all of it…
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…
I run projects across multiple businesses, a screen printing company, a media organization and others. The action items live everywhere. In people’s heads, in transcript files, in meeting notes. Nowhere centralized. I needed to make something everyone on specific teams could access and edit from any device, no app installs, no logins. So I built…
A reader, James McCready, left a comment on our Hard-Won Wisdom post that deserves more than a reply in a comment box. He wrote: “If we’re being honest, pricing in our space is becoming a race to the bottom, and it’s hurting everyone.” He’s right. Custom screen printing in the U.S. is a $12.8 billion…
We have about 300 handwritten press log sheets sitting in binders. Every job that runs through the shop gets logged by hand, date, order number, screens, setup time, run time, comments. The problem isn’t the logging, the operators are thorough. The problem is that once it’s on paper, it’s dead. You can’t search it, you…
If you run a shop, you know this feeling. You invest time training someone, get them up to speed, build a rhythm, and then they’re gone. Research consistently shows that only about 30 percent of employees are truly engaged at work. That means 70 percent of the people on your floor could walk out tomorrow.…
