I received a marketing email yesterday that got me wondering why I don't see Canadian textile screen printers using email for marketing. If you're already doing so, feel free to put me on your mailing list and I'll give you some coverage. If I were in the market for...

Spot cleaning. Sooner or later even the most careful of textile printers needs to do it. In fact I've known printers try to remove entire prints in an attempt to recover garments - but that is another story for another day. A few years ago Tekmar posted one of the...

Local authority Health and Safety inspectors, or whatever they call them where your screen shop is located, can cause you headaches. This is especially so if they find that you have not been maintaining your MSDS sheets properly. Proper maintenance of MSDS sheets...

You or your staff could be working away for the shop for any number of reasons. It could be just a regular work-from-home arrangement, a business trip, or a vacation (though nobody should work on vacation, but that's another topic for another day). If anyone is going...

Here we go again! But in the next few lines I could be saving you many hours, thousands of dollars, and a lot of anxiety. Just a month ago I posted a suggested 8-step emergency plan. In light of the tragic and destructive fires in Yellowknife, Kelowna, and few other...

So let's say that you're considering DTG printing but you're not sure of of everything you should be taking into account. After all, it's a big and expensive step if you're considering anything more than a basic desktop printer. You have research to do and should be...

Unfortunately, we live and do business in a hostile online environment. So any time an expert's tip can help us protect ourselves and our businesses from a data breach, we should pay attention. This tip from RGCS, Scotland, is about periodically checking to see if any...

A report from the International Textile Machinery Association's recent Textile and Garment Technology Exhibition 2023 in Milan, suggests that across the digital sector there is a marked move towards delivering simplicity. It explains that: "New iterations of digital...

I've just read an article about a visit to a large print shop that has a "customer experience center" in its new facility. The customer experience center is a dedicated room designed to allow customers and other visitors to experience how the shop operates and what it...

In the past few weeks we've had devastating fires in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia. And less than a week ago we experienced  unprecedented flooding in Nova Scotia. Businesses like yours have been lost in all these incidents that appear to...

Images magazine, though still not willing to address the use of glitter which has been shown to be an environmentally troublesome microplastic, still offers some good content for textile screen printers. For instance, a recent article on pricing prints. The theory...

I think we all know that producing a great T-shirt is not enough if you can't get it to the customer when and how they want it. And today's customer expects you to give priority to what works for them over what's convenient for you. I was recently reminded of a...

If you have a personal (not business) Google account that you have not accessed for two years, the content older than two years will be deleted. This will affect emails, photos, and data. This will mean anything in the Google workspace including Gmail, Docs, Drive,...

The business author, Harry Beckwith, has views on pricing that, though mainly about services, are equally applicable to pricing for textile screen printing. I'm going to address pricing again later this month, but in the meantime, let's consider what Beckwith has to...

It's an old but effective concept that has had a number of names over the years. But MBWA (Management By Wandering Around) describes it accurately. And it's not about wandering around keeping an eye on everyone and "policing" what's going on in your shop. It's about...

I recently picked up Harry Beckwith's book You, Inc., after not looking at it for a couple of years. And let me interject this here before telling you more about You, Inc . . .  Iif you are serious about growing your textile screen shop or even just running it better,...

It's not news that a properly-managed business needs a business plan. What's also not news is that many businesses don't have one, particularly smaller businesses. In my experience this not because the owners are as negligent as much as they are pressed for time or...