I remember 45 years ago when I was a boy, going to work with my dad who owned a pharmacy. I went to use his telephone and noticed that he had a new phone cord that was 12 feet long. I can remember what a strong impression that made on me. I thought this was fantastic. Now he has the ability to walk around a 12 foot radius and still be able to talk on the phone at the same time. This was in the early 70s and I thought to myself, what an exciting time to be alive to have all these cool gadgets like a 12 foot phone cord in order to make life easier. I also remember when we only had five channels on the television to watch. The TV was black and white and my neighbors got a brand-new set that was a color TV. About one year later they came home with an automatic channel changer called a clicker. It allowed you to remain seated in your recliner chair and not have to physically get up to change the channel. I thought that was the coolest thing. I remember thinking to myself that I would like to invent something, but there was nothing left to invent. Everything had already been thought of.
Today we live in a very different world and modern technology has impacted every sector of our lives. The St. Louis custom T-shirt printing industry is no exception to that rule. The common individual has access to graphic programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator that allows him to create artwork like never before. As a state-of-the-art St. Louis screen printing company, we have access to the very finest equipment in our industry. It wasn’t long ago when a quote was submitted based on the amount of colors that compose the image as well the quantity being processed. We used to have to deal with color separations in order to create individual films for each color in the image. Now we have access to state-of-the-art digital T-shirt printing machines that can reproduce the most complex halftones and gradations in a matter of minutes. It’s very similar to a normal printer but instead of processing paper you feed it T- shirts. It does away with almost all the time I set up and clean up that went hand-in-hand with conventional screen printing methods. We also have access to modern custom embroidery machines that can sew up to 450 stitches per minute.
I think that the biggest difference maker is you don’t have to have a traditional brick-and-mortar facility in order to do business. The whole process can be done from a virtual website including payment processing. This allows us to have a business presence in multiple cities simultaneously and run it from one central location that can be managed from anywhere in the world. People would rather be sitting at their kitchen table, get on a major search engine, and do a search for what would be a relevant term such as St. Louis screen printing company than get in their car and drive 7 miles down the street to a brick-and-mortar facility. The fact that we can ship our T-shirts anywhere in the country allows us to expand our market share without the traditional overhead that would have normally been incurred back in the day. Entrepreneurs have advantages today like never before in the history of mankind. You could literally be a 12 year old sitting at your kitchen table in your pajamas and nobody would ever know as long as that 12 year old had a great looking website that was easy to navigate from. The point I’m trying to make is that anybody who has access to a good web designer can appear to be anything they want you to think they are. All the traditional rules of marketing have changed. Technology is changing faster than ever before and what was state-of-the-art six months ago might now be obsolete. It makes you wonder what kind of advantages we will see in the future. What a great time to be alive!