Pantone colors are trendy, they're high in demand, and they're a dreaded battle. Your closest ally? Your customers. Get them on your side with this quick lesson in color matching.

Are you happy with the way your shop runs every day?  Every facet of how you print or embroider a shirt?  For the most part, probably yes.
However, I’ll bet that there are some aspects of your company that you don’t like.
Customer challenges when entering orders, too many misprints, rampant thread breaks, screens where the emulsion doesn’t wash out correctly.  Rising consumable costs.  Problems with the building.  Dye migration. Digital pretreatment woes.  Not enough time in the day to get it all completed.

Click here to read the full article from Marshall Atkinson of atkinsontshirt.com

Nazdar SourceOne is pleased to announce that Sara Jacobs has been named Customer Service Representative. Sarah will be responsible for providing customer service support for our domestic customers and will be based out of the Shawnee headquarters.

New article from atkinsonshirt: Can you predict the future?  Do you think you know what’s going to happen in our industry a few years from now?  We believe we know…and as a whole the decorated apparel industry is betting that nothing much is going to change.  Our body posture is “head down, gotta get this job out today.” 
One of the biggest human weaknesses is our inability to comprehend that our future might be impacted by forces we don’t understand.  Beyond a science fiction movie, people just can’t predict the future very well.  We think we know, but we really don’t have a clue.  However, one thing is for certain and that is that we live in truly marvelous times.  It used to take centuries for major forces to change industry’s ways of doing business.
Now your entire business world can cease to exist in a matter of months.

From the day we started our textile screen-printing business in 2006, my father, Bob, and I knew an automatic press was in the cards. But as with everything else, we recognized that timing and planning were critical with respect to making the leap. 

New article from atkinsontshirt: Arguably one of the best business books of all time is Stephen Covey’s classic work “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.  If you haven’t read this work, get a copy…especially if you are not as effective as you would like to be.  It is Amazon’s #1 bestseller in business books.  Over the years I’ve probably reread that book a half a dozen times or so.  I learn something new every time as I’m usually on a different part of my journey or working on a new challenge.
I thought that it might be fun to compare his seven habits to what we face each day in an apparel decoration production environment and see how they line up.  Here goes:

Doug Grigar of Vastex International gets a lot of questions about exposure, but there's one in particular, he hears the most. Here is how he addresses it. 

New Article from Rob Coleman, Segment Marketing Manager - Nazdar SourceOne: Transitioning from plastisol- to water-based processes will require new routines and techniques, from the screenroom to the dryer. Here is a quick snapshot of some rules to live by as you make the switch:

New article from atkinsontshirt: In the apparel decorating business?  Check out these random tips to help run your shop better, inject some creative awesomeness into your designs, be more efficient, or simply get that job out faster.

Whenever we receive calls from customers who tell us our inks are not performing as expected, we ask them questions to troubleshoot the problem.
Usually, we find that the ink has not been cured properly during the printing process. However, we occasionally find that the ink wasn’t stored properly, causing it to lose some of its printing properties.
Is there really a right and wrong way to store plastisol inks? Does it really make such a difference? Absolutely! Plastisol is affected by temperature, either hot or cold, which can change the viscosity and printability of the ink.
So here are a few things to remember when storing plastisol inks: