Kushworks Studios Latest News

Happy Holidays everyone.  We’re working hard over at the shop and getting alot of great stuff out to our great customers.  This time of year especially makes me grateful to have a growing business that I enjoy, loyal customers and blog followers, and great friends and family.  The collective Kushworks mind is also on those who are serving in the armed forces and can’t be with us this holiday season.

In the holiday spirit, we’d like to share a link with you that can help give a soldier overseas a small sense of home.  Thanks to LetsSayThanks.com, you can send a thank you card to a soldier serving abroad.  They’re printed and mailed for free by the Xerox company, and go out to troops all over the world.   You can’t pick out who gets it, but it will go to a member of the armed services.  The cards were designed primarily by children across the country.

It just takes a second and it’s absolutely free.  This a great way to say thank you to our armed forces for their service and the freedoms we enjoy, regardless of your political views or opinions.  It lifts their spirits tremendously. You can read some of the messages from the troops in response to these cards HERE.

Have a great holiday.

We’re Having a Sale!

In the spirit of the holidays, we’ve put together our first annual WINTER SALE!  This is part of a mailing currently under way to 1500 local businesses, and we want to spread the savings to our internet and nationwide customers as well.  Until the snow comes and goes, we’ll take 20% off your next order with us – just mention the winter sale when you place your order and we’ll apply the discount to your total.

Just think of all the extra money you’ll have to spend on neckties for uncle Barry.

We took a trip down to our old stomping grounds to do a signage installation last week at Baco Cafe, a renowned restaurant/bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn owned by Motti Berco.  This place throws some crazy parties – the kind where people like Pierfrancesco Favino (From Angels and Demons) and supermodel Diandra Forrest tend to hang out.  Not only that, but they have the tastiest breakfast and best atmosphere in Brooklyn for non-famous people like us too, hands down.

We were commissioned to install lettering across the entire facade of the building.  Each upper panel is roughly 6′ wide by 3′ tall, and the lower panels are roughly 6′ tall.   The install went smoothly and Motti couldn’t be happier.  Thus, we couldn’t be happier.  This is a great example of how even one-color lettering and logo can vastly improve the curb appeal of a business. It’s cost effective, visually stunning and draws people in from blocks away

In this case, Motti and his team supplied the art for us to use for the signage, which we adapted to the size and shape of the building.  We also have the ability to create custom art for any application, but regardless of the extent of artwork required, we work closely with our clients to achieve great results every time.

NOTE: If you can’t view the photo gallery you’re probably reading this on Facebook or Myspace and not our blog.  Click the gallery link above or navigate to this post on our blog to view it.

‘Tis the season for festive graphic design!  We recently designed a DVD cover for Video Artists International, a worldwide distributor of CDs and DVDs based in Pleasantville, NY.  Titled “An Old Fashioned Christmas”, this DVD will be sold around the world starting on November 17th.  You can pre-order on Amazon HERE.

VAI came to us with just a concept and a sketch, and asked us to come up with a finished product for the DVD.  We had some fun with text wrap and colorizing during the process, and put together the final design above.  The client was very pleased with the design and we had alot of fun with it!

What can our art department do for you?

We’ve been working like crazy for the past couple of weeks to get the shop ready for business, and in the meanwhile our Brooklyn office is still operational so I’ve been running around like a madman trying to get everything done! Before I get into it, if you’re reading this from Facebook or another site and can’t see any pictures, click HERE to view the full post on our blog.

First of all, my father came by again and we glued down the section of flooring that we had previously cut, and despite the fact that we had no previous experience laying down adhesive OR flooring, it came out pretty well. Click for full-size.

Floor adhesive is the single stickiest material I’ve ever dealt with – I made the mistake of letting it dry on my arm and I’m pretty sure it’s there for good. On the plus side, my inkjet printer broke in the middle of a job today and I took a wad of half-dried adhesive from the bucket and glued it back together temporarily. I never claimed to be a genius, but come on, that’s just impressive. We still need to do the rest of the floor, but having this section done will at least allow us to move some equipment in and start setting up.

Now on to the office. The guys stopped by and helped with a bunch of the office painting – the original office was covered in disastrous 70’s wood paneling and that had to change.

I figured a nice coat…or 4…of white paint would take care of it. We spent a handful of hours and slapped a few coats of industrial grade paint on the stuff.

You’ll probaby see more of these guys in pictures in future updates, so as soon as this building project is over I’ll make another, more in-depth post about our operation so you can get to know our team.  For now, I’ll just tell you that the gentleman in the white shirt is Ryan, our lead vinyl tech and head of our sign department, and the gentleman in the green shirt is Brett, the head of our graphic design department.

On a side note, taping the edges of a desk with painters tape = good form. Getting paint all over the rest of the desk = BAD form.

That aside, the result is a nice clean atmosphere:

Now we just have to get all of our t-shirt samples back up on the walls for display.

That’s all for now, I’ll try to get some better pictures for the next update. Also, we’ll be moving a bunch of equipment in soon, so check back in a few days for more news!

I’m thrilled to say that Kushworks Studios has a new home!  The lease was finalized and signed on Tuesday, and you’re not going to believe the amount of work we’ve already done to get the place ready for business.  My father came down to the shop for a couple of days to help out with the improvements, and in two days we turned half of the shop from a neglected warehouse into a presentable establishment.   You can see the building exterior in my post from earlier this week, and now I can show you what it looked like inside at that point, as well as the state of the renovation so far.  This is what we started with:

Time to start improving this place! 25 gallons of White paint, 10 gallons of adhesive, one gallon of black paint, and a whole lot of never doing anything like this before.  Pictures of the improved walls:

After painting, we cut and laid out the flooring.  Adhesive will be applied this weekend, it just needs a day or so to flatten out and settle a little bit.

It’s been a long couple of days, but we finished half of the shop already and we’re well on our way to a larger space and a more efficient Kushworks.  Our current shop in Brooklyn is still in full operation, and when the new building is finished we’ll be moving to the new place.  I don’t expect more than a day or two of downtime when that happens, we’ll have things pretty well organized for the move.

Next week we’ll try to get the rest of the floor done, and paint the office area and hallway as well.

For those of you keeping up with this story, I have some exciting news. It looks like we’ll be moving to a new home next month. The lease was delivered this afternoon, and if all looks good I’ll be signing it this coming week. Once that happens, there is a ton of work ahead – we need to move everything out of our space in Brooklyn and move it quickly enough to the new building to minimize downtime. It’ll take a couple of weeks to set up everything at the new shop, so I have a feeling that we’ll be working out of both places for a while, because we can’t possibly move everything at once.

While I was picking up the lease in town I went down to the building and shot a couple of pictures so you guys have a better idea of where we’re going. It’s a bit overgrown so it’s hard to see the whole building in the picture, but it’ll shine right up once we get our hands on it and clear some of those trees and weeds out of the way. The place is about three times larger than our current space, so it’s night and day from our current cramped location.

Click for Full Size

Click for Full Size

The inside needs some work too – new paint, flooring and other small things, so it’ll be a few weeks before we start the move.  Overall I’m thrilled about the building, I’m always up for a new project and I think it’ll be a great new home for Kushworks once we make it our own.

There is so much going on at Kushworks lately, I don’t even know where to start.  First of all, we’re gearing up for a big event at Cecil Dragway the weekend of 10/16 in Maryland.  We’re producing all of the event merchandise (stickers, shirts, hoodies, etc.) and we’ll be selling it at a booth at the event.  We still have some work to do, including making a banner for the booth and finalizing some art, but we’ll have it all ready by the time the event rolls around – I’ll try to post some pictures of our booth after we get home.

We recently did a small job for the new Ralph Lauren Rugby store at Union Square in NYC, which was pretty fun.  They had us make a few decals of their logo for the store opening.  We also did a re-order for the huge Society of Young Magicians, which is always a fun job to do as well.

I saw a biker guy with some crazy bullhorns hanging from the bars:

It reminded me of my own experience with them:

We may be moving to a new, bigger place soon.  The business has really outgrown our original space, so I made the decision to start looking for a place that would give us more room for inventory, equipment and general breathing room.   The top of the list so far is this small, self contained building:

Front entrance, the three large windows face the street.	View from the front door, looking in. Directly to the right is a small office area with a sink, the next right at the end of the floormat is the large room shown in the next picture.
View from the "hallway", this is the main room. In the back on the right side is another room - we will use this as a darkroom.	Small office/reception area. Door in the back is a bathroom. The other side of this wall is the small darkroom in the back.

This building has plenty of parking and an actual storefront, which means customers can find us more easily, we can accept deliveries more easily, and we won’t have to haul supplies up and down two flights of stairs every day.   It’s also closer to home and will let me work at least 2 more hours a day and still get home at the same time.  I will find out by this week if this is our new home, the lease is being drawn up as I type this so I’ll review it at work tomorrow and make a final decision during the week.

Have you ever wondered where you could go to find just about any garment style on the market, neatly organized by type and easily searched?  Ever wish there was a way to preview each type of garment before buying it, or to browse hundreds of garments and accessories in dozens of colors without having to go out to a hundred stores all over town each time you were considering an article of clothing?  Don’t you hate when you find the perfect outfit but the store only has the purple version in stock?  Worry no more, we’ve got your answer.

Announcing the 2009-2010 Kushworks Apparel Catalog.  This truly is your one-stop shop for all of your apparel needs.  Looking for a garment to have us embellish with screen printing, foil printing or embroidery?  Find it here!  Even if you’re not interested in putting a design on your garments, your blank garments of choice is right at your fingertips, in the catalog!  This means that not only can you choose exactly what type of garment you want us to print on, you can now order your blank un-printed garments from us as well!  We still need to get our logo up on the site and clean it up a bit, but we wanted you to have access right away so we added it as soon as we possibly could.

Click HERE to view the catalog, and if you have any questions or would like a quote on anything you see, you can contact us at any time.

It’s softball season!   You guessed it, that means it’s time to post our latest softball job!  This particular team supplied the art, which required a two-color front print and two-color back print.  We separated the colors, burned our screens and got to work: