In March 2015, at the end of trade show season, Rick Roth posted Reflections at the End of the Trade Show Season. Most of it is booth photos. The first paragraph is a prediction.

Rick named the two big trends of the previous ten years: digital printing and environmental concerns. Then he called the next one. “The next round of developments in our industry are going to be in the area of systems.”

His reasoning was simple. You can print one shirt fast. But you will hit a bottleneck “not in the time it takes to print, but rather in the time it takes to transfer information.” What print, what garment, where is it going, how does it get paid. He pointed to Jakprints, a Cleveland shop that processed thousands of orders accurately. In Part III he wrote that “the future is here now.”

I ran the prediction against the shirtboard archive using the same method as RAG from the forum we’ve all used, the DTF piece and the fast growth piece. Pierre from the shirtboard is in the 2015 booth photos. It seemed fair to ask his forum.

2015: everything looked like Windows 95

One month before Rick’s post, a shop owner asked the board about quoting software. ericheartsu answered: “Nothing out there looks great. Everything looks like it was built on and for windows 95.” (t14212.7)

Plenty of shops didn’t see the point yet. kingscreen: “We use a combination of Quickbooks with an elaborate Items list, Google Calendar, and Google Drive. What are the real benefits of using this software?” (t14212.13)

Jakprints was already past that question. In 2014, jsheridan had just taken a job there (t10449.16). When another member asked about running a production floor on tablets, he answered: “our entire ‘system’ is web based so all we’re doing is using a browser to access our production que.” (t12398.1)

The numbers

The forum has a board just for this: Business/Shop Management Programs. It holds 129 threads and 1,322 posts.

The better measure is brand names. I counted posts that name Printavo, ShopWorks, PriceIt, DecoNetwork, ShopVOX or Inktavo.

• 2015: about 3 posts in every 1,000
• 2017: about 7 in every 1,000
• 2018: about 26 in every 1,000
• 2022: about 34 in every 1,000

Shop software went from a side topic to one of the things the board talked about most.

The predictions inside the prediction

The 2021 thread made its own calls. Several came true.

GraphicDisorder: “When someone properly figures out how to be Monday.com, Flock/Slack, and Fast Manager/Teesom/Printavo all in one…….. They gonna own it all.” (t25697.18)

Homer had asked OrderMyGear to build a shop tool. “Order My Gear….I asked them about a year or two ago if they ever planned on developing a management tool and at the time, they were not planning on it” (t25697.34)

zanegun08 asked why the distributors weren’t involved: “I’m surprised Sanmar or S&S doesn’t tackle this project”(t25697.22)

Here is what happened next.

• January 2022: Printavo posted in the same thread. “Heads up we’ve got our first version of a Monday-like experience in Printavo going live at Long Beach next week” (t25697.50)
• 2023: Printavo, InkSoft and GraphicsFlow had joined into one family called Inktavo. The company said it served more than 6,000 businesses.
• December 2023: PromoStandards released Order Status 2.0. Distributors can see where an order is without calling or emailing the supplier. That is Rick’s “where is it going” question, answered by a shared standard.
• October 2025: Inktavo and OrderMyGear announced a merger. OMG’s CEO said distributors, decorators and dealers would have “a single technology partner” for the first time. Homer’s request came true four years later, just not the way he asked.

On the equipment side, M&R and DCC demo systems that track production rates and send back live performance data at ISS Long Beach 2026.

What didn’t happen

One system did not win. In July 2024 someone asked the thread what everyone used now. GoWestRob: “Still on Monday, still loving it, couldn’t imagine anything else.” (t25697.55) whitewater: “Monday as well..” (t25697.57)

Some shops gave up on buying and started building. Lizard hired someone to build a scheduling database in 2021: “jobs are assigned to each press with tablets at each station.” (t25697.46) Atownsend in 2024: “About 2 months into building our own custom app right now, its a lot. But going to be awesome when its done.” (t25697.60)

That is where I’ve ended up too. The time tracker and the setup times work are small systems built for one shop. Which Number Is Lying? shows what happens when the data inside them is wrong. And Bicycles, Not Rockets is the case for keeping the tools small.

The most forward-looking line in the whole thread came from ZooCity in 2021. Shops that print, sew, fold and bag the same order are juggling several jobs at once. He said software could “take great advantage of even rudimentary AI and machine learning to do the heavy lifting” (t25697.16). Absolutely.

What to take from it

Systems did become the story. It took most of a decade, and it is still not finished.

If you run a shop, here is the plain version.

1. Find your double entry. Every place someone types the same order twice is where mistakes and time loss come from.
2. Make your programs talk. Pick tools that import and export. A closed system is a future retype job.
3. Measure before you buy. You can’t pick software for a process you’ve never written down.
4. Small and custom is a real option now. Shops are building their own. So am I.

Original: Reflections at the End of the Trade Show Season – Part 1, Part II and Part III, Rick Roth, March 2015. Forum quotes drawn from the theshirtboard.com archive (20,820 threads, 187,100 posts) and matched character-for-character against their source posts.