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…
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…
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…
