Personalized Customer Service

April 25, 2016

We’ve been in this business a long time and just when we think we’ve seen it all, we see something new that we have never viewed before. In spite of the fact that all the jobs have similarities to one another they are still different because company logos are like snowflakes where there or no two flakes that are quite the same. They are all unique in their own individual way. They often come with their own particular challenges and circumstances that can range from requiring an extra ordinary quick turnaround are a very limited budget.

We don’t have a cookie-cutter approach to submitting a quote because everything that we do is custom. A lot of St. Louis T-shirt printing companies have gone the route of an automated bid request tool. This takes away the personal touch and eliminates the human element out of the equation. We entertained the thought of going that direction a while back, but decided that it was a bad idea. We also entertained the thought of getting rid of our voice mail because we did not like the fact that one of our sales representatives could not personally answer the telephone when you would try to call. We could totally get rid of it because there is always the chance that we could be speaking to another potential customer. But if that did happen, we were always faithful to return your call in a timely manner. Unlike the majority of St. Louis screen printing companies we want to talk to you. We believe that shooting e-mails back and forth definitely have their place as they can be very helpful when used as a reference to what had been previously discussed or agreed-upon. However, there is no substitute for clear and concise communication. The more you convey to us regarding any challenges, as well as details that the job may involve, the better off everyone involved is going to be when it comes to working out a scenario where you are going to be as happy using us as we are providing our service for you.

We are a St. Louis digital T-shirt printing company that specializes in custom screen printing as well as embroidery. We have been doing this for a long time and we are quite confident that there’s nothing you’re going to be able to say to us that we haven’t heard before. Years of experience has thrown us a lot of curve balls over time and because of this we have developed the right strategies and techniques to help offset any limitations and challenges that you might be facing on your upcoming embroidery job. We are not in it for the one time customer as it is our goal to do business over and over again for years to come. We want to work it out where you are going to be equally comfortable acquiring all of your wearable apparel from us just like we are thrilled to make it for you. Then we hope you go out and tell all your friends where it came from.

Giving Our Customers The Best Product For A Fair Price

April 4, 2016

When it comes to St. Louis T-shirt printing companies, we have set the standard. We’ve been at this a long time and decades of experience has lent itself to developing a system of checks and balances in order to make sure that you are going to love your logo’d apparel long before you ever receive your completed product. There is an old saying that reads, if you don’t have time to do the job the right way the first time around then how would you ever find the time to do the job over again? We always start the process by rendering a virtual example of the completed product. This doesn’t necessarily give you an exact color reference because every computer monitor is going to be calibrated differently from another. It does however lend itself to making sure that everything is spelled correctly and laid out exactly the way you prefer it to appear.

Once you’ve given us the approval on that virtual example, we then provide you with an actual sew out of your custom embroidery with the correct color threads that will be going on the garments that you have picked out. You are welcome to stop by the production facility where we do our embroidery. However, if you happen to be on a tight schedule, we can potentially run it out to you or even mail it. We are well aware of the fact that our customers often have bigger fish to fry than acquiring hats. We pride ourselves in quality customer service which often surpasses the expectations, as well as set the gold standard throughout the entire St. Louis screen printing industry. It’s been our experience that anyone can make a mistake, but by following our protocol, we are doing everything that we know possible to keep the problems down to a minimum. In the unlikely event that a mistake does happen we are quick to address it.

The main difference between one St. Louis screen printing company and another is simply the way that they handle a problem. We get the overwhelming majority of our customers two different ways. The main way is repeat. We found that it is approximately 10 times easier to deal with someone that we dealt with before then someone brand-new . This is because there is a history there. The very first time around we not only have to sell you on our ability to get the job done correctly, but we also have to sell you on ourselves. The second time around is so much simpler because you know us and we know you. We also have a record of what you did last time and your logo is on file. That will eliminate having to submit that virtual example as well is your completed sew out that we did on the initial order. Give us a call the next time you’re looking for a St. Louis digital T-shirt printing company and we will prove to you that what we are saying is true.

Doing The Job With Excellence

March 7, 2016

There used to be an old saying that read, “If you can do it, it’s not bragging.”. I believe that what the gentleman was trying to convey was that there is a fine line between arrogance and confidence. We’re a St. Louis T-shirt printing company that also offers custom embroidery for approximately 300 different businesses and organizations in town and across the Midwest. We also take a lot of pride in being able to cater to some of the most challenging silk screening applications. We take on a lot of the jobs that many of our competitors don’t want because they are intimidated. Most of the time we’re simply dealing with a one or two color logo and there’s not much challenge in that as pretty much any of our competition can do that. When we have a customer come in that is looking to reproduce an image that has over 50 different colors, we tend to get excited about it. That’s the kind of job that separates the men from the boys. We often like to make one additional piece in order to hang it on our wall and wear it like a badge of honor for everyone to view. If it was easy everyone would do it.

There is a lot more to being the leader in St. Louis T-shirt printing than just owning the right equipment, although that is very important as well. We have access to the very finest machinery that our industry currently has to offer. Technology has made a major impact in every sector of our economy and the screen printing industry is no exception to that rule. The point I want to make is no matter how well your machinery works and what it’s capable of it’s never any better than the operator that is standing behind it. Our seasoned crew has decades of experience and can provide the right techniques to cater to the most difficult and challenging of jobs. Years of experience also comes into play for our representatives. There’s an old saying that reads, knowledge is power.

There is also an old proverb that says, experience is the best teacher. Our years of extensive hands-on experience in the St. Louis T-shirt printing business is proven. When it comes to getting your product on time and done with excellence, you would much rather learn from someone else’s mistakes in order to avoid making them yourself. Unlike most of our competitors, we would prefer that instead of just sending us an e-mail for a quote request, that you actually would pick up your telephone and give us a call. We believe that e-mail certainly does have a role to play when it comes to keeping an accurate record of what was discussed as well as what is agreed upon. However, it is certainly no substitute for being able to communicate audibly or even face-to-face. This type of communication allows you to accurately convey any challenges that you might be facing as well as your concerns that you might have.

Importance of Good Reviews For Your Business

February 5, 2016

We take great pride and consider ourselves to be the leader when it comes to catering to the St. Louis T-shirt printing needs of our city. This certainly didn’t happen overnight as we come from humble beginnings. It took many years to establish this stellar reputation in our community. You know the way human nature is where you can do over 100 jobs that come up perfectly and your average person doesn’t remember or doesn’t care. But then you do one application that doesn’t come out well and the first thing you know is, they are writing you a negative review. The point that I’m trying to make is that it takes a long time to establish oneself, but it doesn’t take very long at all to go the other direction.

When you do a search for St. Louis embroidery or screen printing, you will see that we are normally on the first page somewhere between the first and the 10th result. This certainly isn’t by accident. When you take into consideration how many other companies there are in our city that are in the same industry as ourselves, this is no small accomplishment. When you pull up our website, we strongly recommend that you take a look at our review page. It will quickly become apparent why the bulk of our work seems to come from repeat customers. In other words, we live and die without repeat order. We believe our work sets the gold standard when it comes to setting the bar high throughout our local competition. We believe we have the right techniques and strategies in order to offset any of the challenges that you might be facing such as an extremely fast turnaround time as well as a limited budget.

We actually encourage you to give us a call as we believe there is a huge advantage to communicating audibly and bouncing ideas off each other. This will allow us to acquire the information that we need in order to provide solutions. It is our goal to put a plan together that is going to be equally beneficial for everyone involved. It’s been our experience that if we end up doing your job the right way then the repeat orders along with you giving our name out to your friends and family when they are eventually in the market for a St. Louis T-shirt printing company. We do all our production here in town locally which helps lend itself to a more efficient turnaround time. It will also provide us with the time we need to not only submit a virtual example of the image before we ever go into the production process, but can often provide you with a physical custom embroidery sew out to make absolutely sure that the right thread colors are being used. Although a virtual rendition of your image will help to make sure that everything is spelled correctly, it does not always give an accurate representation of color. This is because each computer monitor is going to be calibrated differently from another. There is no substitute for actually holding a swatch in your hand and making sure everything is set up exactly the way it’s supposed to be.

We also are now able to cater to digital T-shirt printing which allows us to replicate the most complex images in a fraction of the time of the old traditional way of silk screening.

Marketing A Tee Shirt Printing Company

January 18, 2016

We are well aware that that we are not the only St. Louis t-shirt printing company in town. Therefore, we need to find a way to set ourselves apart from the rest of the competition in our industry. We understand that with just the click of a mouse someone could find us as well as our competitors on social media in order to have their needs met when shopping. The fact that we are living in the information age makes it so different than it used to be back in the day when you had to get in your car and drive to the shopping mall in order to find the store that you were looking for. These days you could actually be working from your kitchen table in your underwear and find exactly what you need as well as where you can find it the most competitive price. Consumers today demand immediate gratification as their attention span is extremely short. If you don’t capture their attention within the first 4 seconds, then they are gone with just the click of a mouse.

Times are changing where people used to take their laptop to a coffee shop and pull up a seat and turn that into their little office during a lunch break. Nowadays, they tend to be working more from their cell phone. Therefore, you need to have a website that lends itself to looking good and performs well on a smaller screen. It would be a good idea to pull up your website on various types of smart phones, as well as laptops and see how different it appears from one device to another.

The most important component of any St. Louis screen printing company is the way they market themselves. They can be the best digital t shirt printing company in town, but nothing happens before the sale. The point I’m trying to make is that you need to make it easy for your potential customer to find you. You only have a few seconds to capture their attention and make them click on your site or they are gone. I would recommend that you include a call to action on the header of your website. This can create an opportunity and simplify the decision making process right from the start. I think it would be a good idea to include this button so that is easily seen from every single page. If not, you are leaving it up to the potential customer to scroll down in order to look for how to submit a free quote request. You should make it easily recognized as well as encourage your visitors to use it. This will allow you to have a much more efficient site for your visitors to navigate and for you to help direct them so that they do exactly what you want them to, which is to fill out the free quote request. We are a St. Louis embroidery company who specializes in custom apparel as well as screen printing and also can cater to inkjet applications and digital T-shirt printing. Please give us a chance to earn your business.

Door-to-door sales versus SEO

December 28, 2015

I have been self-employed for the majority of my entire adult life. I’ve done a lot of different things. When I was a young man, I owned an asphalt company and made a living sealing driveways. It was a tough way to make money, but I was young enough and strong enough to be able to deal with it. It gave the illusion that you are actually getting ahead, but then winter would come around early November and you wouldn’t go back to work again for at least four months. It was extremely frustrating because what took 12 months to accumulate would be depleted in less than four.

As the years passed, I prayed to God to bring me something better and I eventually broke into the St. Louis T-shirt printing industry. Now keep in mind that this was before people owned home computers and there was no such thing as Internet marketing. I used to go down the street knocking on doors making cold calls. I had a pretty good idea that the people who I was calling on actually used custom embroidery, but I just had no idea when the next time they were going to be needing more of it. I would introduce myself and told him that I started a St. Louis screen printing company and would ask them when the next time they eventually needed some more custom embroidery on hats or jackets, if I could simply just have a chance to give them a quote? Most of them would say sure, do you have a business card that you could leave and I would oblige them. Most of the time they would either throw that card right in the trash can or they would put it in their desk with a stack of other cards that was 3 inches thick. Unless it just happened to be on the very top, they would forget that it was even in there. I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they were sincere when they said it, but the old cliché that reads out of sight out of mind proved itself to be true. I would have to ask them the right questions, such as when do you think the next time you’re going to be needing anymore? I would also have to take very good notes and then at the end of the day find a way to organize them in a database that reminded me to call them at that particular time in the future.

I quickly was made aware of the fact that I could have the best sales presentation in the St. Louis T-shirt printing industry, but if they don’t happen to need any product right now that I was just wasting my time and effort. These days instead of me having to make cold calls in finding someone that just happens to be needing it when I happen to be selling it. They simply get on a major search engine and do a search for St. Louis digital T-shirt printing and we show up. All I have to do is convince them that they’re getting the best overall value they can for every dollar they spend. Experience has taught us that if we do our job well, the repeat orders are simply going to take care of themselves.

Starting A T-Shirt Printing Company

December 2, 2015

Although starting a St. Louis T-shirt printing company is not an easy thing to do, it is easier than it ever has been before with the impact that technology provides. Never in the history of mankind have we had a chance to reach out to an unlimited amount of people with just the click of a mouse. Social media platforms have been helpful and proven to be an extremely cost-effective way to run a marketing campaign.

I can remember when the two most effective ways to sell something was either radio or by television. This was known as shotgun marketing that reach out to thousands of people at a time. The problem with this is that unless someone happens to be in the market for what you are selling at that precise time when the commercial aired, they simply couldn’t remember the ad that they had just heard less than 3 minutes ago. In other words, the old saying, out of sight out of mind, would apply. Trying to buy a radio spot was extremely expensive and you had to commit to a minimum of 50 to 100 commercials. Buying a television spot was even more expensive, especially if you happen to be trying to run a campaign during the Super Bowl. Some of these commercials would cost in excess of $2 million per minute. That being said, it was being viewed by billions of people at a time all over the world. If you are the only one that was airing during a halftime show you might have a chance at an excellent return on your investment, but that’s simply not the case. There is competition with many other advertisers doing the same exact thing with aspirations to be the one ad that sticks out in the potential customer’s mind, not only when it’s over, but in the weeks to come.

When it comes to marketing a St. Louis screen printing company as well as custom embroidery, there is not just one way of doing things. Anything and everything you do is going to be a calculated risk. Whether it ends up being a successful campaign or not is just relative to the investment as well as the return. Although some business ventures are going to be riskier than others, I do have my own personal favorites based on trial and error.

I have also learned a lot by studying my competition and seeing what works for them. I can remember when I first got into the digital T-shirt printing industry and I had a salesman from a telephone book give me a call. He gave me all kinds of promises that were supposedly backed by statistics which conveyed to me that if I place an ad under the category St. Louis embroidery company, and is this large, then I should expect to receive this many phone calls. It turned out to be the very worst advertising campaign of my entire adult life.

Starting a screen printing company

November 20, 2015

Sometimes little things mean a lot. This is especially true when trying to build a business. I have seen employees who convey that their employers don’t know what they’re doing. They act like they have all the answers. I say to them, why don’t you quit your job and start your own St. Louis T-shirt printing company? Evidently, you think it’s easy and seemed to have figured out. Two years later they’re still working there. There is an old quote that reads, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.

When I first started this St. Louis screen printing company many years ago, I didn’t have any experience in the industry. I used to be in the asphalt business. Although I was able to earn a living, it was a very hard job which was also seasonal. It seemed like you were making money quickly, but then winter would come and it would be too cold to work. What took eight months to save would disappear within four months. It was frustrating to go from there are not enough hours in the day during the warm seasons to not knowing what to do with myself all day after it got cold. It seemed like by the time March came and the weather was starting to turn in a positive direction, that I felt a great deal of pressure to make up for lost time. Fortunately I was young and strong enough to take it. I remember how much I wanted to get out of that line of work.

I can remember going up to the mall just looking for something to do and to kill time. I am a student of people and enjoy people watching. I took note of the fact that everyone who was walking by was wearing some kind of custom T-shirt or a hat with a logo on it. I can remember thinking to myself that I can sell that. I don’t know the first thing about it, but I believe that’s something I could sell. So I can remember going out and getting some business cards printed up with my new company name, as well as St. Louis screen printing and St. Louis embroidery. I would have put digital printing on there as well, but that hadn’t been invented yet. So I went around the neighborhood and just started knocking on doors to try to find someone who would currently be in the market for some custom T-shirts and silk screening. I must have talked to about 35 people before I walked into this landscaping company who actually happened to need some custom embroidery. I gave them a price and worked out a scenario that was equally beneficial for each of us and walked out the door with a down payment. I can remember being so excited about selling my first job and then the realization that not only are they going to want their product, but I only have a two week window to get it completed.

How To Avoid Polyester Dye Migration

November 4, 2015

Polyester and poly blend garments continues to grow in popularity over the years. It has become one of the most common types of materials used in the promotional apparel world. When printing on polyester and polyester blends, it can sometimes prove to be a struggle, as it’s one of the most challenging fabrics to print on.

The main reason polyester and polyester blends are such a hard print to perfect, is because of a term known as dye migration. Dye migration happens when the dye from a garment contaminates the screen print ink color, causing the print color to appear tinted. One of the issues is when the shirts are printed and go thru the dryer they can look great, but it can sometimes take a few hours or days before the migration starts to happen.

To overcome these difficulties of printing on polyester, manufacturers of decorated apparel should follow these 3 common techniques used to get the best possible print on polyester garments:

1. Dryer Temperature: Do not cure shirts in excess of 320 degrees.

2. Inks: Use a low bleed, high opacity special polyester ink on all polyester products.

3. Stacking : Before stacking garments at the end of the dryer, shake them to cool. Heat from stacked garments can draw dye from the garment on top, into the ink on the garment below

3 things you can do to help:

1. Be conscience and help your apparel decorator be prepared by letting them know beforehand that your garment is polyester.

2. Show your customer the right shirts. Some manufacturers have made polyester shirts that are engineered not to migrate. Sanmars/Sport Tek shirt ST350 is a great example.

3. Your customers love polyester shirts because of how comfortable they are. Make sure you let them know that the hand of the print will be heavier. You may have a great Tri blend 4.3 oz shirt that suddenly gets a bullet proof vest printed on it, meaning a heavy print to stop the migrating. Pantone colors may vary a bit as well.

Even after using the techniques discussed above, some migration may still happen, so letting your customer know beforehand may help any upcoming issues.

Give us a call if you are in the Metropolitan St. Louis area. We have over 20 years of experience in the custom silk screening and custom embroidery business. You won’t be disappointed. We will give you a fair, competitive bid for your free quote request.

Corporate Gifting

October 9, 2015

Believe it or not, the holidays are fast approaching. Have you considered what you may want to give your employees. Believe me, your employees would appreciate a gift from you and what better way to give than to give a custom screen printed garment or custom embroidered garment. They will appreciate it and at the same time, they are advertising for your company or organization.

Also, how about giving to your loyal customers during the holidays. They would also appreciate the thought. Ideas for gifts may include hats with custom embroidery. There are so many things that you could give with custom screen printing. Such items include blanket, t-shirts, insulated coolers, sport packs, tote bags, etc. The list goes on and on depending on what your budget is. You could also have pens and coffee mugs custom screen printed with your company logo.

Not only would these gifts be great to give out during the holidays, but you could as well give out gifts as incentives, safety promotions, contests, etc.

You could also supply uniforms for your employees. Employees would look professional and they are identified as your employee, which is important when your employee is out of the office visiting clients and such.

Give us a call if you are considering this as an option for you. We have over 20 years of experience in the silk screen and embroidery business. We will give you a fair, competitive quote. Hope to hear from you soon if you are in the St. Louis metropolitan area.