Printwear & Promotion The Total Promotional Package
A veteran T shirt printer’s view: 32 years of winging it, 72 hour weeks, stress headaches and the rollercoaster of being in the T shirt printing game. Arron Harnden of Shirtworks reports.
Back in the day, when I was a wee boy of barely 19 years old, I was lost and in Pinetown South Africa having invested all my money in a restaurant, watching it slowly go down the pan.
I decided I would head back to England, a place that held some cold gray memories, just to finish my education and attempt the transition into adulthood. I hated the idea of returning back to Southampton where I grew up, that concrete slab that got rebuilt after Hitler had laid waste to its Tudor magnificence; I needed to be somewhere that would cuddle me with its culture and sooth my eyes with its beauty.
I headed for Oxford… and I needed a gig… fast.
I enrolled at the local college to study art and design and photography and I found a tiny little T shirt printing place with three staff which had been going since 1984. I decided to apply to work part time to fit around my studies.
I still remember my first day through the door. It was completely at odds with my mental picture of what a T shirt printing company/workshop would look like.
I had imagined that it would be a little bit like a lab, where artisans laboured carefully over their craft in a sanitised and organised way.
The reality was a shock.
Shock of the print shop
What I didn’t know at the time was that T shirt printing creates a massive amount of mess; from empty boxes, bits of vinyl tape, ink spatters, cleaning rags, random bits of paper, empty aerosol cans, ink pots and an amazing amount of dust and fluff.
I mean a serious amount of dust and fluff. Seven years of accumulated fluff to be exact.
What was also evident was that it seemed really difficult to get all your printing equipment into a square or rectangular shaped building while managing to create an environment which flowed.
The second major shock, after I had acclimatised to the mess, was the pace at which everything needed to move in order for us to hit our deadlines. That old cliché, which I dare not say but no one has yet to come up with something better, that ‘time is money’ is never truer than in a T shirt printing company.
Despite the dissonance between expectation and reality, it seemed like the ideal place to make my mark.
Finding Everest
I had found Shirtworks, and it was to become my Everest; for which I was wholly unprepared. I began my first tentative steps up its face.
Now, the print room virgin needs to start somewhere. It usually starts with the broom but I graduated quickly to folding and packing shirts, cleaning screens, recycling screens, burning screens, taping screens, exposing acetates on a bellows enlarger, setting up a manual press and then the pinnacle of being a printer, setting up the auto press.
This entire evolution was not conducted under the calm tutelage of a Zen master but under the guidance of someone who was stressed out, had little time or skill with instruction and had terrible people skills. It was like being shipped to Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 and being given a rifle when you got there and then being pointed at the enemy to do your best… and do it quickly.
The necessity to hit the ground running when you don’t know what the hell you are doing is typical of many screen printing workshops. This is down to the fact that they are nearly always on the verge of being understaffed and deadlines are always exerting a pressure which demands everyone’s attention at the expense of other important things like training.
Rising up the ranks
After a year or so of winging it in a pressure cooker, an opportunity arose within the company for me to take a management role and ditch my ambitions to continue with my education.
We were growing quickly, we had taken on three new staff in that year, and it seemed like the sensible thing to do at the time.
My role shifted from just doing the hands on stuff, to doing the hands on stuff while constantly thinking about how I can create efficiencies in order to be able to hit my deadlines, while managing the different personalities under my ward and constantly produce work of excellent quality. The face of Everest just got steeper.
I like to think back on this time as the steel that sharpens steel period. In reality, I/we were barely able to hold it all together. The amount of work was borderline insane, we were squeezed into a building that simply wasn’t big enough and we lacked formal procedures, routines and planning.
Shirtworks needed an evolutionary spurt, it needed to grow up and so we moved to bigger better premises with some thought to routines and structure.
This requirement coincided with the emergence of the internet.
Stay tuned for next’s month’s issue to part two of Arron’s musings on the world of T shirt printing.
