Achieving great results from a print program requires good communication with printers. The complex nature of artwork and the extensive use of specialty ink effects at Haddad made it necessary for me to build working relationships with printers all over the world.
I travel to foreign and domestic factories to review procedures and production quality. I begin by touring a facility, creating an equipment inventory, and interviewing key personnel. I review current production and try to understand what type of work the shop is most comfortable with and what is driving profit. With strengths and weaknesses identified I work with the factory management to help them hit their goals.
Sunrise Printing : Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
I first worked with Sunrise in 2015. After an initial review I recommended they add an artist to bring their color separations and film output inhouse. Sunrise took my advice, and have since become one of Haddad’s best printers in the Saigon area.
Knowing what my client needed from the printer to achieve the finished quality target, I was able to work directly with the factory to help put it in place. It can often be more cost effective to work with existing factories rather than finding new partners. Sunrise was missing just a small piece of the picture, once I was able to help them complete the circle, everything came together.
Fashion Garments 2 : Tan Phu, Vietnam.
Fashion Garments is a group of several factories working together to manufacture apparel for many brands. My challenge at Haddad was to manage the range of quality and technical ability we were seeing in the print submits.
I prepared a series of tests for six factories printing our work and applied a simple grading system to each set of prints. Once presented with the data we were able to get management to place our product at the highest scoring facilities and work on the weak areas identified in the survey. What started as a fact finding project resulted in a powerful collaboration that helped both parties.
Haddad Sample Shop : Wuxi, China.
Haddad opened the print shop in 2014 seeking as affordable way to generate the hundreds of samples needed each season. I began working with them shortly after, to help me create our custom print techniques and specialty treatments.
As we’ve learned to work better together and tackle more complex projects, the sample shop has been instrumental in helping me test and evaluate new inks, appliques and products from manufacturers all over the world. We record the formulas and learnings from our tests and share them with our manufacturing partners. The synergy we have created together while being a world apart impresses me every day.
Yesterwear Productions : Lumberton, New Jersey.
Yesterwear is a large domestic screen printer in central New Jersey. In 2013, Yesterwear moved to a new custom built industrial space, and changed their production to PVC free inks, a Nike requirement. I coordinated with factory management, ink manufacturers and distributors organizing ink system trials at the factory. We evaluated the performance and pricing of all the major Nike compliant ink systems to find what worked best for everyone. This was a year long process, one of the biggest projects I have ever organized and has helped to make Yesterwear one largest and best Nike compliant factories in America.
Tukes Tearoff : East Tremont, Pennsylvania.
Ray Matukewicz and his wife Kathy ran Tukes Tearoff in East Tremont when we met through my work at Outerstuff. Tukes was a large shop printing domestic product for professional sports licenses like NFL, NBA and colleges. Tough work.
They sought my expertise in prepress and artwork to help elevate their non team product. Though high volume, came with the artwork ready and was priced lower per impression. We looked at the types of work that Tukes wanted to attract and developed a training training program for their staff. Using realworld artwork examples we trained the art department on color separations and the used these seps to train the screen and print floor. With this approach management and I felt that the team understood the targets.