Bringing in the New Year – setting your priorities

December 29, 2017

As the old year closes out and a new one is upon us, we should all take a deep breath and reflect on the things that we all hold dear. After all, what does it profit a man to build a successful St. Louis T-shirt printing company if he never takes the time to just relax and enjoy the moment. We often get so caught up in trying to make a dollar that from the moment we get out of bed, take a shower, eat some breakfast, and then head out the front door, we never actually enjoy the fruits of our labor. There’s a lot of wisdom and understanding that tomorrow is not a guarantee for anyone. For example, I can remember the day that the World Trade Towers fell. It started out just like any other day. All of a sudden a plane flew into the building and life changed for all of us. It even ended for those who were actually in the towers. The point I’m trying to make is that we need to have an understanding of the fact that none of us are going to get out of this world alive so we need to make the very most out of every opportunity and not take it for granted.

That is a great segue for working a lot smarter and putting in less hours. As the owner of a St. Louis T-shirt printing company, I am well aware of the fact that we do not get compensated in any way for putting in a lot of hours. There is also no reward at all for standing behind a screen printing press all day working hard. When it comes time to pay our mortgage on our building, nobody cares or wants to hear how hard we tried. All they want is their monthly payment in full and on time.

There is an old proverb that says knowledge is power and people perish for lack of it. While this certainly holds true for the custom embroidery and screen printing industry, there are great advantages available today that have never been there before. Let’s look at the equipment that we use for production. For example,the equipment is constantly evolving and is nothing like it used to be back in the day. One of the keys to this is the increased integration between the software and the machinery that drives. This keeps the equipment operating more efficiently and increases productivity with less operator error.

It is very likely that we can expect to see even greater advances that will allow digital T-shirt printing to become a more dominant method in our industry. Improvement to the equipment is happening every day at a steady pace and a very good example of this is what was considered to be state of the art just a little more than a year ago is now almost obsolete and there has also been tremendous advances when it comes to artwork preparation. No longer is anything hand drawn. With the digital advances that the innovative software used to compose graphics has given us production time has been shortened tremendously. Distance is almost irrelevant and a good example of this is that my artist is actually halfway across the world. It doesn’t make any sense to produce in house anymore. All we do is e-mail him the file that needs to be edited and cleaned up and we normally get it back the same day ready to go.