Kushworks Studios Latest News

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.