man making products is the most exciting part about starting a brand it's the time where your
vision finally meets reality and you can create a product that you could touch feel and even wear in
our previous video we shared ways that you could scale up your clothing brand starting with DTG and
expanding with screen printing in a profitable way in this video we're going to be diving into the
details that you guys need to know of mistakes that entrepreneurs normally make when it comes
to starting launching and printing a brand so if you guys are a new visitor to this channel
make sure that you guys hit that subscribe button located right down below and turn on those post
notification bells to be alerted a future video drops on this channel our mission is to bring
clarity to business and help entrepreneurs build brands that impact the world from the ground up
before you make anything you have to put your best foot forward on the preparation before
reaching out to a shop such as Alive Print Shop which will be taking care of you with a special
promotion if you decide to do business with them but more on that later putting your best
foot forward means understanding what your brand is about and who your customer is when you start
with that you'll have a better understanding about which kind of designs you're going to be creating
and which type of blanks you might use now this is a reason why print shops at a lot of different
locations will have a showroom such as this they lay out a bunch of different colors styles fabrics
feels to the apparel that you might be using and more importantly all of them vary in price
ranges not every blank t-shirt is the same price some of them might be as cheap as a dollar which
those dollar promotional tee's will be as good as uh you know after you're done using them for the
first time you end up using them as a shop rag clean your rims and the bottom of your sneakers
and the other higher price point wholesale t-shirts can range up to ten dollars depending
on the types of cuts dies and the types of cotton that is used and those t-shirts you know when you
wear them you feel like a king you feel really good you feel like like a million bucks and then
when somebody throws in the dollar shop rag into the wash with your 10 dollar tee you get pissed
off and the difference between choosing a blank is going to depend on who your customer is and what
they're willing to pay now if your customer you know is not going to pay over ten dollars for your
designs or for that promotional tee then you have to go with a lower price point blank in order to
have some profitability in that margin and make your printing work but if you know that your
customers are willing to pay 30 40 for a t-shirt then that's when you know you can invest into some
more now once you guys have an understanding of which blank you're going to use and which
garment you're going to select the next part in this process is having the right artwork guys
don't come to a shop making these mistakes that we're about to discuss all right so let's head on
over to the graphic artist who's the one that takes care of a lot of different brands here
and he'll be able to share the pros and cons of what you should be doing and help you guys better
select your artist and the files that you'll need reggie what up bro yo what's going on man hey man
so uh when was the last time somebody sent you a clip art from microsoft paint yesterday last week
because you said you needed a pdf right right so they saved it out as a pdf but it was like
probably two inches by two inches it's pretty pretty small so what's the what's what type
of files do you guys normally like here um the bigger the better so you're gonna need like eps
ai psd anything that's editable like the original file the original phone not the microsoft word
yeah not the microsoft word not the jpeg that's been flattened right the original file because
that makes it easier for us to get through those layers if we're going to change colors if we're
going to size up and down all that matters because the more you size with pixels the more visible the
pixels are that comes into an issue when you're trying to do production and actually really get
those clean crisp lines for your final product i sent you an email too um can you pull up that file
okay not every computer has the same fonts and a lot of people have branded fonts that they use
for everything two ways to get past that if you send us the file you can send it to ttf font the
the font form format so that i can download it and manipulate it um vector is great the only concern
i would have is with the very small letters we are dealing with embroidery right so the yarn
can only give you so much detail it's not the same as something being digital
after you adjust the art you end up sending it to a digitizer do you guys do digitizing in-house or
we actually send it to a digitizer it's a lot quicker it is right because they know what
they're doing exactly they know what they're doing we know it's going to be good um it saves us time
because digitizing is a stitch by stitch method if you see the digitized artwork it has each line
of where the where the path is going to go where the pattern is going to go and it tells
the printers to do exactly what they need to do so our ladies can set it up line it up just keep
the production yeah send that to the digitizer and in the meantime we're going to go and head
over to the screen room so as we're waiting for those files to get digitized i want to take you
guys into the dark room where the designs that you create come to life you guys see me right now
we're in the system that's taking your design from the computer and burning it onto a screen
with this screen you are now able to create the designs that you envisioned and put it
onto garment such as t-shirts bags and any other product you can think of can you guys see me now
yeah that's right guys this system right here takes your idea and makes it into a reality
inside of this room we have a screen room this is where all the jobs that are going to be pending
are organized are then burned in there and as you guys can see Alive print shop
does a lot of different jobs and they got a lot of different orders coming in and they
have to organize their system accordingly once that screen is created it gets taken
and pressure washed right here through the pressure washing it it brings it to life
so once it is pressure washed guys you have your finished screens that are ready and if you guys
can notice right here there's four for a design this is because in screen printing you have to lay
down the ink for each of the part of the shirt which is why there's minimum order quantities
when it comes to printing like this so come check this out they'll set them right here on the side
organized by job and this is where the fun starts once the screen is ready it goes into the screen
printer here which is in auto and able to handle large demand as you can see for a full color
design multiple screens are needed in one machine each color is being pressed in the sequence that
is required and by the end of it they have to unload those screens and physically put the next
design in once the orders are completed they are put through the dryer over here they bag them up
with an automatic bagging machine and they are shipped and bulked to your door you see this is
why there is a minimum order quantity for screen printing you have to see it to fully understand
that your one design with multiple colors is taken over an entire factory floor that has monthly
overhead employee cost facility and much more there's a lot of labor and love that goes into
the making of these products as you guys can see the entire production floor is dedicated to your
designs when it's being made this is the reason why screen printing has a high minimum order
quantity it's why direct-to-garment printing only has one at a time it's just one machine printing
all the colors here screen printing is doing everything from the ink to the design to the to
the bagging to the heating to the drying there's a lot of factors that go into creating your brand
and the beauty about Alive Print Shop is that they have minimum order quantities of just 36 units
and if you're watching this video they're giving everyone free neck labeling that is normally an
upcharge it's all going to be included for free as long as you mention from the ground up as you guys
are checking out and speaking to the sales rep or you guys can also use the links included right
down below to get your ordering process started and if you haven't seen the video where we discuss
how to leverage print on demand with screen printing we're going to be linking that video
right up above i highly encourage you guys check that out as we share a strategy to help you scale
profitably into screen printing bro hey mr johnson man what's up man your production back there is
crazy it's coming together man yeah but it didn't start like this did it no man in my parents garage
with the squeegee pulling a screen and then um after 13 years and hiring amazing people and
building a team it's coming to this bro no this is this is fire man and upstairs you guys got the uh
you guys got the five talent you're working yeah all of our designers work upstairs this is kind of
our cool design area and then we have all of our new five talent products upstairs that's what's
up man and then what would you say is the most like fruitful moment of opening up this location
oh man the best part was bringing embroidery in house okay so at first we used to outsource
embroidery for the last five or six years and then we had an interesting opportunity to buy equipment
hire personnel that knows how to do it they're amazing at it and now it's all in-house from
screen printing embroidery and now we're finally ready to launch our own brand this is this is fire
bro so tell me a little bit about what's going on right here yeah five talent the whole idea is
about i love this shirt no i mean i've got the same one in a different color it feels so good
that was kind of my mission is to you know to buy a shirt that you want to wear two days in
a row you know but um the goal is just to kind of inspire people to go out do their
best in everything they're doing and hopefully you know when you wear a shirt you feel good
you have a better day most definitely you know you put the shirt on you know
you're pulling the armpits yeah you're like you're stretching you feel like you're not rude ready to
go you got the wrong shirt on it'll ruin your whole day yeah it will ruin your itchy neck
so that's why the fit the feel feels great i sent one of the first shirts out to one of our
influencers and he's like i think this might be my favorite shirt and i'm like okay we're
on track that's what we're trying to do and so you guys you guys have experience printing for a lot
of different brands what would you say is one of the things that has differentiated the ones that
were super successful that you continue to do business with you know i think being organized
i think it's all about the customers i see i mean i've seen people come in that have amazing designs
and maybe it was a one run and that was it but i've seen other people that instead of treating
it like we're going to put out a t-shirt they're treating it like we're going to build a business
we're going to be organized we're going to think about our spring collection our summer collection
we're planning things out because um you know during convention season we can rush things
through we can do rush orders but if you're going to make a quality product it takes a little bit
of time picking out so i would say you know being organized planning your schedule out hey you don't
need sweatshirts in vegas summer you know just little things like that when your product shows up
how it shows up choosing the right items and then from a customer's point of view i always say hey
start thinking about your retail price right when you're making shirts don't focus so much on the
product that you're not thinking about to sell through it's about selling if not you it's just
an expensive hobby you know you're just gonna have more boxes in your garage of t-shirts focus on the
sailing focus on building your brand marketing it and then let us print the product let us build it
because those are two separate things and so if you focus on getting your brand out there
it's going to sell through but if you focus so much on building a shirt and not selling
it's not going to sell it's that simple so tell us a little bit about the transition
from your first location i know it was like a couple hundred square feet right to your
to your second location and this is your third right yeah this is our third location i mean the
first location was the garage one roll up door a few hundred square feet um second location
was on sahara we had uh about 1500 square feet uh i mean it was kind of so bad like we didn't
have a wall between our our desk and our washout room so you know when someone's pressure washing
hold up oh give me a second i gotta answer this phone call and then i mean it was just
it was a mess but we just kept showing up and doing it and finally built a little room and
you know our first dark room was like a bathroom so you go in the dark room there's a toilet in the
corner the screens are all stacked up and but we had an auto press there which really took
you know production to the next level instead of pulling a squeegee and we just did that for for
five or six years and then we found a unique opportunity uh on the northwest side of vegas
there was this whole complex that was pretty much you know dead there wasn't any renters in there
and we came in and actually decided to start purchasing our first building which was huge
step but the rent payment wasn't very you know wasn't much we just had to come up with money down
and finish build outs and we did a whole build out and then we went to 3 400 square feet we had
offices we had a door between our washout room so we got there the pressure washer and after being
there a few years you know we finally got a second auto so now we could run you know twice as much
um and then we ran that until um 2020 and we finally made this move um you know mid
2020 and moved here and actually you know with everything going sideways it actually was probably
the best worst year that we ever had because we scaled up from two presses to four we brought in
a whole embroidery department we went from 11 to 25 employees and i just knew when everything being
messed up there's opportunity here like there's got to be opportunity and we know once things
open up they're coming back and once they come they're just going to explode during this these
shutdowns right there was a lot of shops closing a lot of businesses going out of business and
again you saw an opportunity there you're like yo are you selling this equipment big companies
out there that they were they were big giant machines you know and they had to run so much
work to stay open and to have you know 150 employees and all this kind of stuff
and then there was an opportunity with a few shops closing and you know we end up picking up about
half a million dollars worth of equipment for about a hundred thousand which was scary it's
scary to make that kind of investment when everything's shut down but i just i know it's
coming back you know i have faith i i see that people are still ordering i see that you know
people are ready to get back out their schools are coming back and i just wanted to you know
go all in and put myself in a position where i could handle it when it comes back because it's
going to be big i remember hearing about Alive like for years throughout the community like
a lot of my friends printed there like i always knew about you guys so being in here was awesome
first of all um and the second part was that you were you were also doing brands like
you're starting up your own brand right so there was a there was some clothing brand that you had
started in the mix of all that and then yeah and then things like everybody's first business
they don't always go right if you're going to run a print shop you have to master the print
you know how to do it how to get orders in and out of time trying to do that and run a brand
and trying to run a retail front it was just too much it was too much for us and you know we would
you know eventually you start doing everything 50 and halfway and then it's not that great and so
um we originally started this to build our own brand and then we just saw that the need of you
know you know what if we go out and service people that are also looking for what we do um that will
that's gonna be the best way for us to make you know make revenue and grow and we just decided
to commit to that and did that for the last 13 years right so now we've got 25 employees we have
printing embroidery design packaging fulfillment all these different departments and it kind of
was like you know what i think it's time for us to do our own thing we can do it all let's take
let's finally branch out and put ourselves out there and go after something we believe in for
everybody that's still watching this video right now what he just mentioned and what he just wanted
to highlight is that it really does take faith for you to stand out to step out and pursue the
thing that you guys want to pursue because things aren't going to come to you just because you have
an idea and you want to make things happen it's not until you start taking action that you start
to bring clarity to what that vision may be and then you make some adjustments right along the
way you have clarity about what you're thinking you're wanting to do and then as you fail at them
you're like yo you know what i have a little bit more clarity let me make some improvements with
my business like he did he did uh he invested into equipment he went all in and just like you guys if
you guys are gonna be starting up a clothing brand there's a lot of there's a lot of issues that are
gonna happen in production there's a lot of issues that are gonna happen in the launch of it um but
there's things that you can do to essentially prevent a lot of those issues from happening and
that's by working with a quality print shop like Alive Print shop they'll be able to service your
designs right they'll be able to make sure that you have your artwork correctly the first time
be able to recommend things that you're going to need to get the best quality product out there
and that's a that's that's something that a lot of print shops don't do sometimes they'll just take
your order they'll be like all right so this is what you want all right let me let me slap your
thing on there fastball print shop this is what you're good at and then and then you get the shirt
and you're like what this is not what i thought it was and then they say you sent us the artwork
that's how it's gonna come out right so there's little little issues that a lot of times people
don't i mean that is one way to do business but that's not a way to build a long-term you know
customer base and things like that and i mean even with us getting together and doing five talent
it's kind of brought us back to what it feels like to be the customer i mean we run production and
all this stuff and we we kind of got that figured out but now launching this it's it's back and i'm
like oh this is hard you know like we're used to working with so many other customers design so to
make it from ourselves and you know envisioning it and making sure it looks like that in the
final product um that's one thing i love about doing this new project is it i want i want to put
ourselves in the customer's shoes because i want to know okay did it come from what i thought it
looked like to what it kind of finally looks like in the final product and if we did our job right
our goal is to bring the design alive man such a powerful interview that i hope you guys really
enjoyed and we're able to better see how important it is to have a vision for what you're trying to
do that way it continues to motivate you every single day that you get up and work on it
and we hope that this video helped paint some insight about how you could better position your
brand now the reason that we're covering Alive Print Shop and the reason that they're doing a
promo of free neck labeling for every orders is because we've seen them do business over
the years and they've honestly have grown from a small setup to a smaller setup to now this bigger
setup and we know they're going to continue to grow as their customer service and the patience
of working with new brands is really what makes them stand apart so if you guys enjoyed this video
i highly encourage that you guys reach out to them and mention from the ground up as they're
giving away free neck labeling free neck labeling with every order of screen print that you do the
best part about it is that their minimum order quantities are just 36 units for a full color
design regardless of whether you want to do one color or eight color it's all the same price
and that's really what's cool about what they do is they wanna help you succeed by you not having
to worry about your profit margins and costs you know exactly what it is going to be out the door
before you even get started and you know what you could sell your products for based on the vision
that you have so i hope you guys enjoyed this video and if you haven't seen the first video
that we launched with them i highly encourage you check that out right now as we talk about a direct
to garment to screen printing strategy that'll help you grow profitably and scale it up without
much money out of your pocket so we'll see you guys in the next video on our channel
you