Trust Newsletter: January 2016
A Brand New Year
Ahhh… it feels good to be back. 2015 was our biggest, best, and busiest year to date, and while a bit of fatigue seeped in at the end of the year, our Christmas break has refreshed us and allowed us to look back on it with clear eyes. What we see is an amazing example of a focused, tight-knit team working incredibly hard together to accomplish an astonishing amount. Using that as our base, we look forward to 2016 and see nothing but opportunity. We’ve already begun with our biggest January ever, and we can’t wait to see how high we can climb.
A small note: moving into 2016 we have made a slight change on our lunch schedule. We’ve bumped it up to 11:45—12:45, looking to hit our favorite spots before the major lunch rush and hopefully leaving some extra time for knockout, four-square, or naps. We have also instituted a weekly extended Friday lunch, adding an extra half hour of fun to our week. If you’re like me, you thought that was more than enough fun stuff, but Trust said NO and also declared the last Friday of every month an official family meal time, offering to buy the whole team lunch and help us continue to grow our relationships and our family atmosphere.
Parties and Prizes
Before we completely move on to the excitement of 2016, we thought we would talk about the fantastic cap we put on 2015. Our Christmas party this year took place in our beautiful warehouse. It was a wonderful party, the guacamole flowed freely, the four square was intense, some great (and not-so-great) gifts were exchanged, and there was much laughter and merriment. We also got to present our 3rd Annual Trust Awards to some very deserving people. Grace’s “Best Hair” crown was usurped by dark and mysterious newcomer Travis Bryant. The Sloats’ dominance was proven with the “Best Couple” award, Tiff’s “Best Attitude”, and Jeremy’s “Employee of the Year”. And Ryan’s ego and trophy case grew as he defended his “Funniest Employee” title.
Some Massive Teasers
Tired of us talking about our exciting 2016? About how awesome everything is going to be? Well sorry, because I have one more exciting thing to talk about. This one might impact you a little more directly. We are moving our external website and our internal database into an official Phase 2.
A little over a year ago we launched our new website. This was a huge moment for us. We are extremely proud of it and it truly expresses what Trust is and what we can do. The big thing that is missing from the site is possibly the most important part of Trust: the experience of working with us. The personalized service, the insightful knowledge and helpfulness of our Customer Reps, and the power of our internal database Central were absent or incomplete. We aim to fix that, and we aim to do it in the most efficient and user friendly way possible. We have spent hours and hours with dry erase markers, pens, pencils and keyboards shaping and designing a fully featured user account system. As we get closer to launch we will give you some more information on what this will mean to you and your company, but for now all we can say is start getting excited.
Along with the massive updates to our website. We are also planning an overhaul of our internal database, Central. Central is the (central) hub of Trust, tracking our orders from start to finish, communicating between departments, distributing live information to all corners of the shop, and performing complex calculations to make us more efficient and consistent. It was built almost entirely by our owner Matthew Lucas over the course of 6 years. Central 2 is much less of an update than it is a complete rebuilding of our system. We will take the base of Central 1 and optimize it. Central 1 was for the most part built just to work. Now that we have a fully functioning system and an intense knowledge of the software and the process, it is time to build a smart, lean, and beautiful version full of awesome bells and whistles and improved speed.
Print of the Month
TeeCat — Convention
5 Color Plastisol on Next Level 3600 – Black
—
This month we’ve got a great print from one of our most prolific customers, TeeCat. The art here is great, with bright colors and different shades of the same colors. This is a fantastic example of trimming down and planning out your art to work with fewer colors.
These photos also showcase our incredible new lightbox that we use for press checks. Jeremy has built us a beautiful dedicated space with bright, color specific lighting so our artists can evaluate each print and compare it to our mockups in the perfect environment.
We used one of our favorite new methods on this print: the double base. Instead of printing a white base and a white hi-light on top of the wet colors, we put the hi-light second in the order and use a second flash before the colors. This gives us a few great benefits. The white comes out smoother because we are able to flash and stroke over both whites (almost like a heat press). The white printing before the colors also cuts down on how much each color gets stepped on which is always a good thing. The best part about it, however, is that we now get to use the hi-light as a second base! We can grab our brightest parts of the print, like the bright blue hair or the bright red in the background of Convention, and put two layers of base underneath them. This gives us brighter colors than ever before with the same number of screens. This process doesn’t work for every print but it is an official part of our repertoire, so ask us about it and get ready for some super brilliant colors!
