[VIDEO] The Tshirt Mill: taking the custom t-shirt world by storm

Transcript:

The Tshirt Mill started by selling t-shirts at the markets. We used to go down to the South Bank markets every Saturday and Sunday. We got to a point though where we couldn't turn designs around fast enough, demand was just too high.

So we researched buying a machine to print them and print our own t-shirts and we started printing in her apartment in the spare bedroom where it was very small and you had to walk around the printer sideways, because there was very little room. We had shelves all around her apartment with the stock in them and we used to pre-treat on her balcony.

So we used to walk through the apartment with the t-shirt into the spare bedroom. And then we used to have a heat press in the lounge room. So it was ah, it didn't last long, which is good, oh yeah it was about a year, yeah I reckon. It lasted too long!

The products that we can customise are hats, mugs, iPhone cases, little bits and pieces here and there, we also do vinyl transfers so we do lots of transfers on bags, caps, pretty much anything, we can transfer on to just about anything, yeah anything that we can't print on to we usually throw on the transfer pile but we also do a lot of on-site printing work, which we do everything for as well we take our DTG machines on to on-site printing jobs we take the vinyl cutters the dye sub machine so that we can customise just about anything on-site for anyone. Mostly corporate functions we do. We've done Sun Super, which was a quite a big gig for us, we customised mugs at a big conference...quite a lot of mugs in a very short amount of time so in two days we do about a thousand mugs which are personalised with the delegates names.

Not only do we like festivals, we thought it'd be a good time to kind of incorporate our love of music and our love of printing and ship some stuff down and a couple of staff and set up at Splendour in the Grass and you know, see what happens! So it was good it was great it was a really really good experience so we took a shipping container down, lots of stock, we took one of our Epson SureColors down as well and what we did for people at Splendour is basically put whatever they want on to a t-shirt. Mostly faces, faces and people having a good time.

The beauty of t-shirt printing these days and technologies is that we can print full-colour photographic so people can send us a photo that they've taken at the festival or an event or during their everyday life.

What our website does is people can jump online, they pick the products that they like whether it be a cap, t-shirt, apron, a mug anything they want customised they click on the product and a design tool pops up and it allows them to add whatever they want they can add a photo, text, a logo, anything they like and they add it to their cart and check-out. So the beauty of the design tool is that they can add lots of different things to their product and then we just print it and ship it to them! Yeah and with our machines they're full colour printing and full photographic quality so it doesn't matter if your artwork is a photograph or has lots of colors in it you know we can we can print pretty much anything.

• Highlights
• Design and print hundreds of customised products for customers - all in-house or on-site and on-demand
• Epson SureColor SC-F2000 desktop direct-to-garment printer
• Roland VersaSTUDIO BN-20 Metallic Desktop Eco-Solvent Printer/Cutter