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…
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.…
I’ve been talking to my computer instead of typing for the past few months. Once you start, it’s hard to go back. Not every app lets you dictate into it. So I’d been talking into one app that does, copying the text, and pasting it where I actually need it. It works, but it’s clunky.…
On this date in 1851, This Guy Started the Modern Garment Industry: Isaac Merritt Singer was granted U.S. Patent No. 8,294 for his “Improvement in Sewing Machines” and the garment industry as we know it was born. As with many famous inventors (Edison, for example), Singer didn’t really invent what we think he did. He…
Custom screen printing in the U.S. alone is a $12.8 billion industry. Business is good, but growth doesn’t mean we’ve solved our fundamental problems. Here are some Hard-Won Wisdoms for Garment Decorators worth remembering. The Lies “You can save $5 a gallon on cheaper emulsion.” Evaluate emulsion by your production numbers and ease of use,…
