The Washington Post this morning has an article about how Amazon aids and abets thieves in selling counterfeit merchandise. This is rampant in the t-shirt world as well. I regularly have to police all the many many sites selling shirts that have bootlegs of even my non-profit and charitable organization clients. Printers have to get…
We recently had a new employee ship a package via UPS to a US Post Office box and it was a very important shipment. UPS does not generally deliver to a USPS box. We were lucky and this was a concert venue that gets lots of packages and UPS automatically reroutes them (with a charge)…
Ah, Pantone, how I despise you and let me count the ways: The color guide books are expensive as hell considering how many books they sell and the fact that in our industry and others I presume they also get licensing fees for inks that match their Pantone colors. The cost means that not only…
We manage the merch for Farm Aid at their big benefit concert once a year. With great anticipation we’ll see how we do today. We get some of the anxiety that has us relating to the tough job farmers have, will it rain and ruin sales, will it be sunny and we sell more cowboy…
We purchased a Brother GTX machine and it is awesome. It is a DTG machine, what is called “Direct to Garment.” For those of you not in the industry, it prints a shirt with a special textile ink in full color. The Brother GTX is one of the first DTG machines that really can handle…
We printed this shirt at Mirror Image nearly 25 years ago. It had to be approved by Robert (pronounced RO BEAR) Doisneau in France. In order to print it we separated it and set it up and printed it almost 16 times to get it right, at a time when film was really expensive and…
Following last week’s post on using organic embroidery thread, we received a lot of questions about where to find organic embroidery thread. Here is a great supplier, Fiberactive Organics. For years, company CEO Julie Moore has offered genuine certified organic thread and in dozens of colors! It is all GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) certified,…
We recently produced a 100% organic cotton cap. Not only was the fabric made of organic cotton, but the embroidery thread was also certified organic! A few thoughts… Like many “green” alternatives, you can’t just substitute organic thread for conventional embroidery thread made from rayon or conventional cotton and embroider away. On the other hand,…
Q: Is the ink dry on the shirt you printed? A: It doesn’t matter. Ink can be dry on a shirt and it will not last through a wash. Unless you are unethical and plan to leave the country after selling a shirt, you want the print to stay on the shirt beyond the first…
July 19th would have been Barry Chouinard’s 68th birthday. We mourn his passing and most of us remember him pretty damn fondly. He lived a full life, touched lots of people, and nobody would say he got cheated. So I pose the question, “Did you ever meet Barry Chouinard?” The only possible answers would be…
