Sunburst Logo LLC

Let’s talk about the advantages about living in a digital environment where marketing campaigns as well as money and ideas can move around the earth at the speed of light. I remember when I was first starting out and it was a much smaller world. St Louis was my one and only market. There really was no way for me to reach anyone outside of that. An average person did not have a cell phone back in those days and the very few privileged individuals that actually did were charged a premium for every minute they were on the phone. To add insult to injury, even if you ran one second over they would round it up to the next minute. At the end of the month, people we’re extremely surprised and even shocked to see the bill that they ran up.

I was in the asphalt paving business before I ever even dreamed of opening up a St Louis t-shirt printing company. As I think back, I remember what a tough business that was. Not only was it hard work, but it was seasonal. During the warm months, I can remember putting in 15 hour work days. I’d spent the first part of the day out with a crew working on driveways and after a ard day’s work in the sun, I would then go out after around 5:00 when people started getting home from their day jobs. I would normally put a sign in the front yard of a customer and would proceed to walk down the street and take notes regarding the various driveways that I encountered. For example, let’s say they had a pothole or a crack on the front apron of the driveway. I would then write down what address and what specific problem that house might have had and then go to the library the next day and use something called a Haines Criss-Cross directory. Since there was no internet at the time, this was the tool most people used to find out exactly who lived at any specific address along with their phone number. I would then call them. I remember calling them up and saying you might have seen my sign as we’ve been working at your neighbor’s house and I dropped their neighbors name in hopes they would recognize it.

I mentioned that I get a lot of work keeping my eyes open and I couldn’t help, but notice as I walked by you had a problem on the right side of the driveway by the sidewalk. Well, that immediately got their attention that I was able to talk knowledgeably about their problem.  I mentioned that the very least amount of asphalt I could buy at one time was 2 tons and although that seems a lot it really doesn’t go very far cuz it’s extremely dense. I did say that their problem wasn’t going to take that much though but if you’d be interested in a quote, I could potentially do that job while I was still at the neighbors and therefore I could give it to him for a lot less than if I was to make a separate trip out just to fix their problem.

I’m going to continue this story on the next blog cuz it leads in on how I got into the St Louis Screen Printing and custom embroidery business. I’ll also touch on digital t-shirt printing using the direct to garment method comparably to the direct-to-film method.