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’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 been crazy here the last few weeks!  We’ve expanded production and upgraded some equipment in order to conduct business more efficiently.  As part of our expansion, we have increased our workforce as well – we now have two full-time and two part-time employees – screen printers, sign / vinyl gurus and graphics designers – who work together to produce amazing results.   We’re quickly out-growing our current location, and will be moving to a bigger place within (hopefully) the next month or so.

Here is a picture of the new printing press that we recently set up – it allows us to print up to 6 colors per design, and with ease.  I’m not going to lie, I gave it a hug.  You would too.  Actually, stop by and hug it yourself, it’s an experience to behold:

Our new M&R Chameleon Manual Press

The past month feels like a blur,  but we’ve been so productive that the end result has made all of the late nights and early mornings worth it.  We’re just finishing up a large shirt order for a new clothing line, totalling 55 separate designs and over 2000 prints, and may be working with another designer to produce a new fashion line for next season.  It’s fun to be a small independent print shop – even though we have the production capability of a high volume printer, we can keep our costs low enough to  accept jobs that are more experimental in nature than the typical high volume printer would be able to do.  That sort of freedom of creativity is part of why this business is so much fun.

PINKS All Out!

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Fiorello Motorsports Shirts at PINKS All Out at MIR

We just got back from the filming of PINKS All Out for SPEED channel at Maryland International Raceway, and man am I tired.   We went to support our good friends Al and Melissa who run the race team we sponsor, Fiorello Motorsports (Melissa is the driver), and had an awesome time despite rain delays and tornado warnings.  We debuted the t-shirts in the picture above that we made for the team, which they loved, and once again verified that our vehicle decals stay in place at 120+ mph.

I’ve said it before, but we’re really thrilled to sponsor such a great team and great people, and thank them for their support of us as well.  More pictures of the event to come!

Don’t you hate when you only get a little piece of the information?

This is a sneak peak of one of two race cars we’re representing this season.
More info at a later date.  Stay tuned!

To the Track!

ls1melissa

We are very excited to announce our sponsorship of Ls1Melissa and Fiorello Motorsports this season! After long negotiations with the Fiorello Business Relations Committee, we have signed on to provide not only our boyish good lucks and undeniable charm to her marketing efforts, but will be designing and printing the official Fiorello Motorsports T-shirts for the team. In addition to that, we will be manufacturing and applying all of her great sponsor decals for the race car as well.