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T-shirts as Great Billboards

Hey found two of our shirts had big public showings and even better, the displays were for good causes. It feels good to get something positive happening with some fabric and some ink slinging. There are a couple of great charities that my company Mirror Image works closely with: We print shirts for the Armenian…

Reflections at the End of the Trade Show Season (at the end of the retail era as we knew it…)

I woke up to a Business Insider article about the decline of retail stores.    They report that a third of malls are in danger of closing, and that visits to malls decreased 50% from 2010 to 2013. Noted at our industry shows, American Apparel will be closing their 110 retail locations and Abercrombie closing…

The Only Thing Worse Than a Bad Boston Accent…

I live in Cambridge, MA and the last time I checked it was not part of the City of Boston. Some new t-shirts appearing at “our” new Target (really? in Central Square? Good luck unless they have a liquor store in there) store were designed apparently by a New York firm. How you could design…

Favorite Shirts

Most of you reading this post are like me, you make your living selling and/or printing t-shirts. It is nice to remember that besides money we make people very happy with our work sometimes. I saw my old friend Matt Gauland yesterday and he talked about how he loves his piles of t-shirts. He recently…

Rave On. Blacklight Ink

We discovered a cool Union Ink product this week called Black Light Clear. It is transparent when printed but glows under blacklight. We printed a normal ink and then printed the clear over it. It glows under blacklight. Rave On!

And the Winner is…Oops!

Apparently a retail outlet got ahead of themselves and put out Falcon Super Bowl Champion merchandise before the game was over. The Atlanta owner came down to the field before the game was over to join the uh… celebration? These were not good moves. My company has printed lots of championship shirts and we have…

Victory Shirts

Winning the Super Bowl means getting a Super Bowl ring (NFL pays for 150 of them at $7K ea.,) kissing the championship Lombardi trophy (#%&* the germs,) a check for $107,000, a parade (in Boston that means riding on a duck boat,) and getting a t-shirt. Funny how getting a t-shirt is part of it…

Misprint Monday: Clearing Out Old Files

In a move that moves me closer to going fully to DTS (Direct to Screen) I have started to clear out old art files. What a bad chore that would be so much easier if everything was digital only.  If you have lots of space like we do (almost 30K s.f.) you tend to save…

Cubs and Indians Win! No, not a misprint Monday on that but…

The Cubs and Indians are in the World Series! Who would have thunk it? Besides my thinking that if the Cubs win the next round that Theo Epstein becomes a candidate for the Baseball Hall of Fame, I have a couple of other thoughts as a t-shirt printer. Clearly most of the t-shirt world is…

Farm Aid 2016 Lesson #1: Simple is Best

One of the Mirror Image artists and I stood in the middle of the crowd at Farm Aid. As many of the 20K people in attendance filed past us, we took note of what they were wearing. Simple, simple and simple was the conclusion. What did we see? One color designs for the most part,…

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