Trust Newsletter: September 2015
One Color Summer is Over
As the children head back to school and our commutes become even more of a hassle, we must also bid farewell to One Color Summer. These two months have been a blast. We have had the joy of producing over 34,000 one color prints for 79 customers, enjoying the efficient printing and loving the opportunity to provide discounted prices to our awesome friends.
Live Printing Gets an Upgrade
We talk a lot about our live printing events because they are so important to what Trust aspires to be. First and foremost, they are a fun break for us from our normal work. They also provide us the opportunity to get out and show off our people (who we count as our greatest asset). Finally, they allow us to provide a wonderful service to our customers with high quality, limited edition, hand printed shirts and a great experience.
This month, Trust added another level of commitment to our Live Printing, with a new 6-color manual press and a new trailer to haul it in. We are still developing with these new tools, but we think they could be the beginning of an incredibly efficient and capable Live Printing system for Trust.
The new manual press.
The new trailer will allow us to transport bigger and better equipment easier and faster.
A Great Milestone Deserves Pizza
Every year in December, we meet as a team and review the previous 12 months. We discuss what went well and how we can improve. This past year Matt came to us with what seemed like a crazy proposition. In 2014 we had 42 brand new customers, so Matt challenged us to get 100 new customers in 2015 with a pizza party on the line.
This challenge sounded impossible, but with a new focus on social media and marketing, a new shop in a new community, and a push to get out in the community with live printing, we have already hit and exceeded our goal. We finalized an order for our 100th new customer on August 17th and we haven’t slowed down yet. As of today we are at 124 and counting which means…
Going Up
Every year since its inception, Trust Printshop has grown steadily. As we have grown, we have added people and tools to facilitate our new demands. In the past, we have been able to expand slowly and absorb new business gradually. But the summer of 2015 has brought us a new, wonderful problem. With our 124 new customers and growth of current customers, we have suddenly become incredibly busy. We have worked late, we have come in at 4am and left at 10pm, and we have all spent our spare time in production folding and bagging to get our orders out in time. Most importantly—no matter what it took—we successfully maintained our incredibly high standards in our printing, our service, and our schedule. We are officially closing in on our maximum capacity, and so we have brought in reinforcements. Those reinforcements are arriving in the form of extra hands in the screen department and the long awaited Press 3/second dryer combo.
It may not seem like a very large change, but Ryan Johnson’s younger brother Marc has joined us in the screen department to work alongside Grace and free up some of Jeremy’s time to aid production. Press Three will not initially have a full team built around it, but it gives Jeremy room to prepare jobs during printing, severely cutting down our setup times. Our second dryer also sets us up beautifully for an eventual fourth press, giving us great room to grow and slowly fill out our wonderful shop.
Taylor demonstrating which direction we are headed.
Any serious growth comes with growing pains and these last few weeks have been painful at times, but our team has responded with determination and without complaint. We’d love to use this space to formally thank each member of our team for their tireless, selfless work and to thank our customers for pushing us into this exciting growth. We are 3/4 of the way through 2015 already, and it has been an incredible growing experience. We have enormous dreams for 2016 and beyond and we are so excited to keep going upwards to places we can’t even picture yet.
