Founder Mark Lane of Coed Naked, told the whole story at an Ink Kitchen Shop Talk, and it’s a masterclass in surviving the cycle. TBT: The Coed Naked Truth. Here’s the rundown. Lane bought the Coed Naked trademark, customer list, and artwork in 1990 for $15,000, started with roughly $46,000 in co-signed bank loans, and…
How do you get your team to own projects instead of waiting for you to fix everything yourself? It’s one of the oldest headaches in the shop. In this Shop Talk, Rick Roth sits down with Ali Banholzer, who has built a system that turns “what’s broken” into completed projects, done by her team, not…
We’ve been publishing since 2014. That’s twelve years of screen printing posts: techniques that turned into industry standards, characters worth re-introducing to a new generation of shop owners, and arguments about ink, pricing, and process that read like they were written this morning. What Throwback Thursday Is: Here’s the Rundown. The premise is simple. The…
Start With the Brain Dump, Not the Slides The biggest mistake I made early on was opening Claude and asking for “a 15-slide deck on screen printing safety.” You’ll get something. It’ll be generic, vaguely true, and useless. Better approach: dump everything you know about the topic into the chat first. Bullet points, half-thoughts, that…
Be authentic, or don’t bother A truth most shop owners learn the hard way: chasing markets you don’t actually understand is a fast track to burnout. In this live shoptalks form 2022, Milissa Clark runs her own print shop in Austin alongside her fiancé, and they’ve doubled down on music and merch because that’s the…
Back in 2015 Rick got a scam email from “Ken” wanting to ship shirts to the Solomon Islands. No address, no phone number, broken English, and a credit card as the payment method. Rick’s advice was simple: if it’s too good to be true, it is. Delete it and move on. Phony orders scam screen…
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…
