Trust Newsletter: April 2015
Fort Worth Friends
Trust has been operating from Fort Worth for a full four months now, and we are loving our new city. We have already made some great friends with our Fort Worth neighbors, and the end of April has seen us take collaboration to a new level.
Our first order of business was a friendly game of kickball with our old friends at Schaefer Advertising Co. They put up a good fight with some late arriving reinforcements, but in the end Trust was treated to some delicious victory ice cream at Melt. We had a blast in the sun and we can’t wait for a rematch!
Trust attended a City:SHAPERS popup event early this month and made some great connections with Joey Turner and Kari Crowe Seher of Brewed Gastropub and Melt Ice Creams, respectively. These are great people doing some great things in the city and we couldn’t wait to be apart of it.
We had the privilege of joining Melt for their 1 Year Birthday on Saturday April 18. We live printed custom shirts and ate way too much ice cream. They even named a flavor after us! Proceeds went to The Birthday Party Project, and we had so much fun.
Next stop was the next day at the Open Streets festival. Magnolia Avenue was shut down and we were posted up in front of Brewed live printing coffee-themed shirts and posters. There were a couple fun twists this time: the ink was infused with real coffee to give it an authentic color and make our booth smell great, and we let anyone who was interested print their own shirt or poster! We had so much fun sharing screen printing with people of all ages, and people loved taking home something that they printed themselves.
Clarke Week
From April 20 – 24, we had the incredible opportunity to pick the brain of one of the most brilliant screen printers in the world. Joe Clarke has been in the screen print industry since 1967. He literally wrote the book on four-color process screenprinting. He is an expert on ink, screens, press equipment, and all other areas of printing. Matt and Joe have become friends over several trade shows, and we were so excited to get him in our shop to review the technical half of our process.
We can’t overstate how much Joe impacted us. It’s easy to get comfortable when you feel like you are good at something, so it was refreshing and energizing to realize we have so much more to learn. We got intensely technical, left every day with the best kind of headache, and sparked our entire team to keep pushing forwards.
Trust Cut Guards
One of our favorite new ideas is the customization of our cut guards. We’ve put cut guards in our boxes for a long time to protect the garments on top when the box is opened, but we realized that we could be using those pieces of chipboard for another purpose. We started a daily tradition of writing notes on our cut guards. The notes range from motivational to informative to very silly, but they are all handwritten and they come from the heart.
If you get a note that inspires your or makes you laugh, we’d love for you to share it with us. Hashtag #trustisms and check out posts from our other customers.
Image from Common Grace Threads
Oh, Sleeper Concert
Matt’s connection to the great band Oh, Sleeper goes back even further than Trust Printshop to Matt’s days in the music industry. To celebrate Micah’s 30th birthday Oh, Sleeper held a celebratory concert at The Door in Dallas. To make things even more special, the guys asked us if we could design a custom shirt and print it live at the concert. Our creative director Jesse MacKenzie and his good friend / illustrating machine Jake Bloom tag-teamed an awesomely ridiculous shirt that was perfect for the occasion. We had a blast at the show and sold over 120 hand-printed shirts to some awesome fans.
