Mike Freeman and his wife Nichola are doing a roaring trade selling customised T shirts and hoodies.

What’s more, they own the only Permaboss NGL 50 laser machine in the UK which has helped them to corner the market in appliquéd Abercrombie & Fitch-style sweatshirts and hoodies to meet the growing demand for that American college boy look.

With a high season turnover of some £40,000 a week, The Shirt Shack has become so popular that Mike is now offering franchise opportunities while looking for other retail locations with a high footfall.

Not content with that, the business is also hoping to secure even more high volume contract garment printing orders to see them through the less frenetic winter months.

Mike is a born entrepreneur. He started a mobile video library when he was just 18. He freely admits he’s made a pile of money and lost it.

“I should have been a millionaire by now,” he jokes.

Still in his 20s, he had the Porsche 911; the executive home; the boat in marina. He once had a thriving business with six stores selling discounted brand name sports products.

“When we had six stores, we had a turnover of £7m a year. You don’t think it’s going to end. You think it’s going to get bigger.

“Then 9/11 happened. We’d just opened a 6,000sq ft warehouse housing half a million pounds worth of stock. When the planes hit the towers, we ended up with half a million pounds worth of winter stock… and it all came crashing down.”

Now he lives above the shop but at the age of 40, he’s older, wiser and more content than ever, growing his business and venting his creative spleen – because the creative side is what he really likes best.

“When sportswear came to an end, we downsized and just kept this store,” he told me. “Then we moved into fashion but we never really had much interest in that. It earned a living.

“One of the lines we kept getting from our supplier in Turkey was a comedy T shirt. If it was a good line we’d sell a carton in a week. So I started thinking that maybe I should start printing.”

The comedy T formed the cornerstone of The Shirt Shack and Mike bought his first manual press with a screen printer starter package.

“I had no formal print training,” he recalls. “I did a lot of research on the internet but I discovered that there isn’t a lot out there for the new guy when it comes to screen printing. The industry does need a training school because it will bring new people to the market.”

Location was key to the new business. “We obviously do well here because of the tourist trade,” Mike told me.

And the ability to turn garments around quickly is hugely important.

“Young girls love having a name on a hoodie,” says Mike. “The best production method for that is vinyl. A good 90% of what we do is vinyl.

“We have cutters everywhere and back-up cutters. We have got it down to a fine art now.

“We can turn an order around within 10-15 minutes, from the time we take the order to having the finished item.”

In the summer, the shop processes 300-400 garments a day, but even then, the wait never goes beyond two hours.

“With screen print, Cad Cut, Versacamm, laser cutting embroidery, Direct to Garment printing, sublimation, rhinestone decoration and transfer films all under one roof there is nothing that we can’t do!”

The fashion for personalised appliqués on clothing spurred Mike’s decision to invest in laser technology.

“It’s very cool; it’s something different. It’s better than vinyl. It doesn’t take as long as embroidery and it’s unique,” he tells me.

“I discovered Permaboss on the internet about a year before they exhibited the NGL 50 at the Printwear & Promotion show in 2010.”

After seeing lasers in action on YouTube, it was a case of “that’s exactly what I need”, said Mike.

“We started off with a Chinese imported desktop laser cutter and I retro fitted it with some of my hooping arms so that I could do the same sequence; go from the embroidery machine to the laser; cut, back to the embroidery machine. It was working, but it was just a bit slow and wasn’t as precise and I really wanted a machine that was going to speed up the process.”

Customers love seeing the laser in action. Lifeguard hoodies are particularly popular in Weymouth. “Customers watch their order being done and see the little flame going off and etching it in,” says Mike.

“To produce one of our popular one off designs – a girl’s name in a glitter appliqué material which is then satin stitched around with a few flowers – I can digitise one of those in three and a half to four minutes. The cut, the laser, the tack down is all pretty quick. If we can lose the satin stitch and get people to like the beam stitch finish, production would be extremely quick. You could get a full A4 filled area within minutes rather than 45 minutes at a time.

“That’s why Permaboss say it’s like an embroidery machine on steroids.

If you can convince a customer that instead of having a 5,000 stitch design – we know laser etching takes seconds and costs nothing in material – that would be something.”

In addition to the Permaboss NGL 50, Mike also has an Italian-made Proel fitted to the Amaya XTS embroidery machine.

Explains Mike: “Basically, it’s a fibre optic laser cable attached to needle no.16, so whenever I digitise a design, and I want a laser cut, I just make that a 1mm laser stitch. When it uploads into the embroidery machine, you just say ‘colour 16’ and the laser automatically knows that when the needle presser foot starts firing up and down it fires the beam, so it perforates it as it goes down. The registration is perfect – for one off designs, it’s no harder than digitising any design. You are not using separate bits of software.”

According to Mike, the Proel works particularly well with the Amaya machine.

Mike finds that the Proel eLaser is great for sampling one-offs and for day to day work.

“The advantages of the Permaboss are probably speed and the ability to etch – you can etch into wood, fabric, fleeces – and if you had 20 embroidery heads, all 20 heads could use the Permaboss laser,” says Mike.

“You would run running stitches on your machines, take them off, load them under the laser, cut each one then load them back on your machines and continue sewing.

“So it’s not as restricted as a laser bridge which sits over a 6 or 12 head embroidery machine,” he adds.

Recently, Mike has had the head upgraded, increasing the cut field from 300 to 340mm.

“One of the reasons we originally bought a cutter was because I’d got into airbrushing and I was airbrushing remote control helicopters. I had this little graphic robo stencil cutter. It really sprung from a hobby,” says Mike.

In addition to the Weymouth shop, the business has four websites offering online ordering.

“We have the Shirt Shack T shirt site selling comedy Ts and a bit of custom printing. We have an ebay shop, which is probably the strongest of all the online stores. Then there’s a corporate site, Nexgen Embroidery and we’ve got 3D embroidery, which is a new one.”

So what’s next?

Mike reckons he’s ready for the next big push – which includes three levels of franchise package: an entry level, a custom shop and a top-end package costing £20,000.

The recession, he believes, is a time of opportunity. “It’s a good time for expansion,” he says.

“We have finally got The Shirt Shack how we want it and in the last couple of years we have begun to get the look of a brand about us. People were coming in and asking us where our other stores are.”

So the franchise model could put The Shirt Shack on the map across the UK.

Watch this space!

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