Success Storie Ep 96 - "Printing Special Relationships"

Many people in this industry dream of building something special. On today's Success Stories podcast, we'll chat with James Bowens with Print Villains in Booneville, Mississippi about just that. 

James has been in the industry for a bit and has started sold and started over with a few businesses. And today we're gonna chat about inspiration sales, the importance of getting great employees, and much more. 

So if you're building something along those same lines, this is one episode that you don't want to miss.

Transcript

Marshall Atkinson 
Many people in this industry dream of building something special on today's Success Stories podcast, we'll chat with James Bowens, with Print Villains and Boonville Mississippi about just that. James has been in the industry for a bit and has started sold and started over with a few businesses, and today we're going to chat about inspiration, sales, the importance of getting great employees and much more so if you're building something along those same lines, this is one episode that you don't want to miss. So James, welcome to the Success Stories podcast.

James Bowens 
Thanks a lot, buddy. I appreciate that.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, at the end you're in Mississippi. I'm a Florida boy, so I'm used to the, we'll say the southern climate, you know, and lots of heat, lots of humidity, and probably Mississippi, I'm sure you get a ton of that.

James Bowens 
We do. And I tell people all the time when they come to work for us, especially if they start during the spring going into summer. We don't charge them anything for the extra weight they lose here, because they get hot.

Marshall Atkinson 
Oh, that's great. All right, so let's get started. Now, I'm always curious about how folks get started in this industry. So what led you down to this road. James, well, you know, acquiring minds. Want to know?

James Bowens 
Well, for me, it was a happy accident. I guess you could say I had started back in 1999 trying to figure out a way to make extra money. Was young, had a wife and two daughters, and we were always hungry and never seem to be enough food, if that makes sense. So we started that's about the time eBay kind of got really popular, and we started buying different items and putting them on eBay, selling them, starting to build up a little money, a little inventory. We started from there, and was able to get into a couple of local flea markets in the Northeast Mississippi area. And from that, it just kind of took off to where we saved up enough money. Finally, in 2003 we opened our first collegiate store in the Barns Crossing mall in Tupelo, Mississippi that encased college sports. We were selling, you know, anything from gift items to apparel, a lot of different things of that nature, and that's kind of our threshold into business. So in doing that, we found success, and we started building up a little bit of funds. And so it's like, all right, what do we do next? And so we continue to open those stores up throughout the southeast. But I got intrigued by kiosks because kios has had a bunch of T-shirts on them, and I would see a lot of people selling T-shirts. And so I thought, well, you know, I need to get into the apparel business. That seems to be a good way to go. So a silver friend of mine, Mark Mcaryes, came by, and he said, James, I've got something interesting for you. I think you should buy it. And I said, What's that? He said, cotton logo T-shirts. Now, if you're in parts of the south, you probably know what it is. If you're everywhere else, you probably have no clue. But basically, it's just the cotton logo brand on T-shirts. And they were doing them in college colors, like red and blue for Ole Miss maroon for Mississippi State. And college kids were buying this stuff like crazy. So I told him. I said, Well, send me $1,000 worth. I'll put them on my kiosk to see how they do. Well, I done that.

Marshall Atkinson
And hold on, these are just blank shirts?

James Bowens
Blank T-shirts. Where we put the cottage logo or the cotton logo on it. So it had the cotton bottle symbol on the front left chest right, and the cotton logo on the back, just one color, white, right. Person. And so the first weekend went by and I sold every one of those T shirts off my kiosk. So I called the sales rep back, and I said, Hey, Mark, send me another $1,000 worth. And he said, Okay. I said, well, I need them by this weekend. I'm out. He said, No problem. Well, weekend came and I never got these shirts. And so I called Mark, and I said, Hey, Mark, I never got the shirts. And he said, really? And I said, Yeah, I don't understand why. And so he calls me back in about an hour, and he said, James, I talked to the guy that does the shirts. He said that you haven't paid your $1,000 for your last order. And I said, Well, I know I haven't. I said he gave me a $50,000 credit limit, and I have net 30. I've only had those shirts 10 days. It's not time to pay for it. He said, I know, but he's not going to send you shirts until you pay the bill. And I said, Well, that doesn't make sense. I said, I can pay him the bill, but that's not what we agreed upon. So anyway, at that time, I was young and dumb and full of rage, I guess you could say. And I thought, well, I will just go buy me. A screen printing machine, and I'll print my own cotton T shirts. So...

Marshall Atkinson 
Oh, so you got into the business for revenge.

James Bowens 
Absolutely. Maybe that's why we're called Print Villains. Who knows? So basically, I called Print assistance and got me a manual machine. I think it was a four color four station, you know, something like that. And I reached out to a distributor, got some blanks, then got some inks and different things, and learned how to screen print in the back of my collegiate store, sport zone in the mall. And I started making those T shirts. I didn't understand how good that would be for me, because I started doing the math what I had in it and what I was actually selling it for. And I'm like, my god, there's something great about this. So I did that for about six months, and just printed as many cotton shirts as I could. It was, it was nuts. I was doing like, 200 to 300 shirts a week by myself in my back room. And I thought I was rich, you know?

Marshall Atkinson 
It's just the same logo, the same color. I mean, that's just one idea over and over again.

James Bowens 
Yeah, that's all it was. And so we ended up putting up kiosses, and then we end up going out on the road, because people would, hey, I'd like to buy those shirts from my store. And we started wholesaling them out. And from that, I realized there was money in it, and so I came up with this idea to start selling girl shirts, because I noticed in my mall store, it was a lot of women, and I was a college store, but I had more women shoppers than I did guys shoppers. So I was like, Well, I'm going to make stuff for women. And so we always grew up. I have two daughters, Krista and Whitney, and me and my wife always called them girly girls. And so we decided we would get a trademark and license girl to girl originals. And we started making ladies T shirts that were 123, colors at most. And did not realize how big that would go so fast. So we were running, I think, our first year, you know, it was a partial year wholesaling it out, we did close to a million dollars in sales just wholesaling those shirts. And, you know, we thought we did hit the jackpot, you know, because profit margins were good, we didn't have a lot of overhead, and we were just so excited. But as we started picking up sales reps to sell for us. We had, like, a 500% increase, 1,000% increase, you know, and it just kept rolling year after year after year. So in 2014 I had a company reach out to me and was interested in buying my brand. They're great people, Derek and Paige Pace out of Texarkana, Texas. We were doing some screen printing from Leo. They. They were interested in our brand. We sold to them in 2014 and retired for a short period of time. And I drove my wife absolutely crazy. And please go back to work.

Marshall Atkinson 
You spend time on the golf course or the lake fishing or like you're just at home, driving your wife crazy?

James Bowens 
Well, apparently, so because I'm not really good at golf, and the only thing that I'm really passionate about is I'm a weird individual in the in the sense that I don't really care about money or things, but I love creating stuff and making money. The success of it, you know, my family was not very successful. Most of my family, you know, sad to say, probably lives off the government or, you know, just refuse to work. They're not always the best people in the world. And so I would look up to other people that I went to church with. Seemed like they had it all together, and they were working hard trying to provide for their family. And my dad didn't provide for me, and so I wanted to provide for my kids. So when I got into the business aspect, I realized that there was a lot of things I could do for my church, a lot of things I could do for my family, a lot of things I could do for the community by just going out there and working. So during that period of time, we went from like one college store to 14 college stores. We opened up outlet stores for girl to girl and Tanger Outlets. We had hunting and fishing stores. We had real estate. We grew to a point that we had a couple of 100 employees, and when we chose to sell, we sold everything right as we got out of business cold turkey, and I was 40, and I probably wasn't ready for that. And so, you know, my wife allowed me to go back to work. And so I love what I'm doing. I'm passionate about it. So what we did for ourselves with girly girl, we now do for other people. So we print for other clothing brands. Now we print for colleges, we print for big companies like Mossy Oak or Walmart, and we print for Joe smo who has a car shop or a construction company or a restaurant, and so we try to help people brand the things that they are doing, whether it's paper goods, because we're not just screen printers. We, we are broad green. We we make signs, we make banners, we make stickers. We do UV printing for cups. We do the newest technology, which I'm crazy about, and I know we'll probably talk about some is direct to film. I really love what that's doing to the marketplace and how you can help customers out that normally you couldn't help out with a multi color job in screen printing. And so yep, we have a 44,000 square foot warehouse that we just people send us stuff. We put stuff on it and send it right back to them, and we love it. Absolutely love it.

Marshall Atkinson 
That's great. That's great. And this is Print Villains now, correct?

James Bowens 
Yes sir, Print Villains. That's the only business that I currently operate, and it's the, roughly, the only business I told my wife I would ever do again. She didn't want me to get to a couple of 100 employee never around anymore.

Marshall Atkinson 
That's such a positive thing you're doing. What's with the name print villains? Because that seems like maybe a little bit of the opposite of that idea.

James Bowens 
Well, you know, for me, I love movies, yeah, and taking my kids to Disney ever since I could afford it. We love characters and the villain aspect. And you know, as well as I do being in the industry, it's very hard to find a unique name with T shirts and printing anymore, and especially to be able to get it trademarked and buy the URL and get Facebook and Instagram and, you know, tick tock and all these things associated with it. And so in our warehouse, all of our walls are covered in villains. So we have 80s characters like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger. And then we got villains like in Super Mario Brothers, like Bowser, and we have Ghostbusters villains in here. We have the Joker. And so we spray paint the inside of our warehouse. It looks like a train that's going down the railroad track where everybody graffitis. That's what the inside of our shop looks like. It's villains everywhere. And okay, for us, it's cool. Sometimes we'll do Tik Toks and videos, and the shirt loaders are in a villains mask. You know, we have Darth Vader here, and we have, you know, Kylo Jen here. So for us, it's the love of movies, the love of art. When people come in our graphic designers, and they all get inspiration, because it's just art everywhere, and so we love it. So that's the name Print Villains. I was driving back from the Smoky Mountains, but one of my VPs, we went up there to see a client that we do a lot of souvenir stuff for in the Pigeon Forge area. And I was like, man, we got to come up with a cool name, and Print Villains kind of stuck. I told my wife, she's like, Yeah, sounds cool to me. So our color scheme rests in green and purple and black. And, you know...

Marshall Atkinson 
That's great. And so also it's different. I think sometimes when you have a name that's different, enough people remember it easily.

James Bowens 
Well, absolutely. And one of our we have several different LLCs and corporations, but we were operating under the name Critter Broke designs, and it's not very memorable. And we have that because we have a farm that we live on and kind of service as a thing that takes all of our money. It seems like, you know, with animals, but

Marshall Atkinson 
You can have a boat or you can have a farm. You chose farm.

James Bowens 
Yeah, I chose farm. But, you know, we have zebras and all kind of weird animals running around. So that's cool for my grandchildren, but, you know, so just I approached a few people, gave them names, and I said, which one do you remember? And everybody was like, print them. Like, print villains. That's a cool name. And so my truck has villains on it, you know? It's just kind of something we're known for.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, cool, right? So throughout this company and your last company, you've had to sell stuff, right? And you can't grow a business without sales. Man, I think a lot of people in this industry really struggle with that concept. And one of the things that I talk about with the classes I teach, or the coaching clients I have, I think a lot of people have this idea where it's kind of like Field of Dreams, where, if you build it, they will come, which is not necessarily how the world works, right? We have to go about and hunt and get clients and and build relationships and do that kind of thing, right? So, so, James, what do you think? Excuse me, what do you think is the most important thing about finding the right customer, like the targeted customer, and then going out and helping them? Like, how have you built your business over the years, by really identifying who you're going after?

James Bowens 
Well, for me, it was somewhat simpler than probably most, because at the time, when I first started with Girly Girl, we hired a lot of contract reps. There were a lot of reps on the road back then, and so they had relationships with stores already. They got us into their stores. I built relationships with the clients from there. And so for us, when we got back in the business, it was fairly simple, because we already had people that knew who we were and knew what we did, trusted us. So it was kind of easy to get started. But for me, over the years. What I found that works is relationships. Relationships to me is the most important thing. I like to consider my clients my friends. Now, not all of them want to spend time with you, of course, you know, but I try to spend times with clients. I have some clients. We've went on vacation together. We form really relationships, a lot of relationships. My mom passed away about six months ago. Some of my clients traveled to see me from, you know, other states. So I try to build a family atmosphere with my co workers here and our team, and I try to do that with my clients. I genuinely care about them and their well being, and so I want them to be successful. So in doing so, we cultivated a culture that when clients do choose to travel here, we give them tours, we set them down, we offer them beverages, we show them the variety of things that we can do for them to help increase revenue. And so when we put out a good product and we have good relationships, what we have found for us. I don't know if it works for everybody else, but a lot of times I don't even go on the road anymore. People just call my phone because one of my clients said, Oh, you need to use James. And so I picked up probably 150 clients last year just from referrals from people we do business with. But we're old school to the point to where if we screw something up. We fix it. We don't try to blame you. You know, we we take ownership of it and we redo it. We pay for it, we do whatever, because our goal is to have a client 20 years from now. 30 years from now, I will my daughter, who will take over my company, to keep those same clients. And so we try to go above board with everything that we do to provide good quality service. But our people also know we care about them and we want to do the best for them and their company, because their success is my success. Now that I'm a contract worker, you know, if their business grows, my business grows. If I put out crappy product, they're not going to be able to sell it. They're not going to grow. And so we look at as we partner with everybody we do business with, but we're going to know their name. We're going to know their their spouse, we're going to know everything about them. Because we think the future of business is something that's being lost, and that's relationships. Because everybody gets on their phone and they just order and click and they don't build relationships. And I think relationships is still important in sales, and so that's what we focus on.

Marshall Atkinson 
 So do you try to go see people or do video calls or what do you what's your technique to build that relationship? I think, especially with folks that are under 20, because everything to them was about texting and they don't really want to talk to anybody, and they're just like, you know, I'm an old fart, and I'm all about seeing people and going and, you know, and doing things where I'm in front of people, but I've noticed that the younger crowd is all about if I can get away with not actually having to talk to anybody, it's a win, right? And yeah, what do you think about that?

James Bowens 
Well, we try to do both. To be honest. It's kind of like, you know, we didn't know we needed Facebook or Amazon or Walmart until all of a sudden we had them, you know, and so we tried to look at what everybody is doing, and not necessarily just do everything, but pick out a few things that we think we can focus on. And so we do do the relationship, but we also are very understanding that some people don't want that. So we have a system, printavo, that allows us to text back and forth, email back and forth, show art, show quotes. And so for that person who just wants to be on their phone and click Approve and get their job done, we have that too. And so we try to offer both, because some people are still old school. They want me to come see them every year. Show them stuff. Show them what we can do. Go out to eat. You know, have a cigar. If they want a cigar, you know, have go to the park and walk. I don't care, you know, whatever they want to do. We just, we try to make it happen, and that's what they love. And so we make notes in our system. That's what they want. And other people that are just, hey, shoot me a picture. This is how I want to do it. We make notes in our printavo system. And so we try to be all things to all people the best we can. It's not always possible, but we make an effort to try to do it. Because, you know, right now, we're trying to find a social media and a web designer and a photographer and a video or all in one. That's one of the things we're looking for for our next phase, because we want to push more to Tiktok, to Facebook to Instagram, to help get our name out there. And so we're looking to try to find that kind of new niche. Because right now, a few of us handle it, but I'd like to have a professional doing it every day. And right think that's a lot of what things are going to you know.

Marshall Atkinson 
No, hey, if you're listening, James is hiring.

James Bowens 
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Marshall Atkinson 
You've been in business for a minute, right? So you come up with new and innovative ideas, because a lot of times, I know from everything that I've done in my career, if I can create something that are absolutely blow the doors off the client, they're going to order more shirts, right? I can't let them do their designing sometimes, because they're not really good at that, and I am right so, and that always led to more sales. Is us giving the client really great ideas that they can sell and make money on. And as a contract decorator, right? This is a really great superpower to have, because then everything is about, hey, can you do some more designs for me? And it's less about price, right? Because if I'm helping you make money, you're going to be my best friend because I'm helping you or, you know, pay for groceries for your kids, and that's going to be a big thing, right? So how do you guys come up with new ideas and different things that you can do for your clients?

James Bowens 
Well, for for me, we do it a variety of different ways. First of all, we use the internet and research, for short, see what the trends are and things that people are doing. But we go to a lot of shows. I go to equipment shows. I go to apparel shows. We spent a lot of time in Atlanta and Dallas and Vegas, going to see what the newest, hottest thing is on the market. And then what we try to do is like today, before we had this podcast, I was down talking to one of our guys that runs our DTF and our UD training, and I gave him a list of about 15 clients. I said, Hey, pull up their logo and put it on this Stan Lee cup. I said, I'm going to send it to him. I'm going to send it to him as a gift, but I know when they get it, they're going to order, you know? So sometimes we just put stuff together and send it to our clients as a thank you, in hopes that we do get a return on it. But if we don't, we appreciate them anyway. You know, they're great. And so right now, that's something we're doing to kind of showcase something new that we're doing, that they may not offer. Because one of the things like for us, you know, in my lifetime, I've probably, between all the machines I've had, I've probably had about 50 million impressions. So I'm not the biggest guy in the world, but the smallest guy either. But most people know us for screen printing. I want them to know us for everything else we do. And we try to take some of the new things that we do to show them, hey, there's other avenues that we can make money together. And so that's one of the things we're currently doing now, is just making some product and showcasing it. We we have a Kiwanis Club here. Then this guy, he's, he's a great guy, he's older guy, and he's always wanted something different, and so we UV printed on the toaster yesterday, because he's given toasters, you know. So, hey, you know, we take pictures of it, we share it on social media, because somebody else may want to toaster too. Who knows.

Marshall Atkinson 
That's great. I love that.

James Bowens 
Yeah, we're just trying to be outside the box and kind of be ahead of things. And that's one way we do it, is by going because, you know, you can go to some of these shows, and, man, you can spend three days out there and see equipment you never heard of. And so then we try to figure out what, what needs can we do that? Is that something we can offer to moss oak, is that something we can offer to a college? Is that something we can have offer to the hundreds of restaurants we do work for? And so when we find it, we purchase it. You know, I'm a big risk taker. I think you can you're not taking risks. You're not trying. And so I'm always looking for the next big thing. And if it's investment, we'll figure out how to sell it when we get it. Let's get the machine. Let's get perfected on it so we're really good at it. Let's come up with a pricing structure on what we can do, and then let's go run and get it. And that's what we do.

Marshall Atkinson 
That's great. And one of the things I've talked about before is having the permission. Do give yourself permission to fail, and think a lot of people get all up tight and they always want everything to be perfect, and they won't try the new thing because they've somebody might laugh at them, or it won't work, or it might cost you a little money, or whatever. But what I found is, you know, if you just do it, whatever it is, if you just do it, you're going to get better at it, and what will happen is, you know, the third time, the fifth time, the 20th time, you've perfected it to the point where now nobody can catch you, right? And you've got something that's just amazing, yeah, all right, so, so let's talk about the future of the industry. You're talking about DTF there for a minute, right? Where do you see, you know, your company, you know heading this year, maybe next year. What's around the corner for you guys that you think is really going to be a really, a big, a big domino that could fall and really, really create a lot of profit, or really create a lot of sales for you.

James Bowens 
Well, right now, I'm a big fan of the direct to film just being in screen printing, as long as I have, you know, they have digital squeegees, and I'm not knocking these things by any means. They have direct to garment. There's vinyl, you know, there's screen printing. There's tons of ways you can decorate a garment. The easiest one I've seen so far to make the most profit is direct to film, and what we initially bought it for a year ago was to cut down. And I know a lot of people out there know what I'm talking about. Let's say you got a job for 288 pieces and it can't be short, or you got a 5000 piece job that can't be short, or you have a 48 piece job that can be short, you set up on the job, you run it perfect, and then you realize there's a hole in the garment are there's a tear underneath the on I've got to sit back up and do that one shirt. And it cost me a lot of time, and it eats up my profit. And so we were talking to several different people that we're friends with in the industry, and they were telling me about this direct to film, and I'd been researching it and looking at it and talking to different people about it. And I was like, man, if we could get that and if we could line up the pan tones to where it would look, okay, then we could do that one shirt and not have to sit back up again and cost us a lot of money. So I was like that in itself, will save us money and it'll save us time. So we got the machine in, we learned how to work it, and realized it the it took a minute to get the pan Tom and everything right so it would look right. There's a little different in the feel of it, but for the most part, it was able to cut down and speed up production for us in screen printing, because we didn't have to go and set back up to do a job again because of a hole or something got scrapped, or, you know, somebody loaded crooked. You know, there's always mistakes that's going to happen when you got humans involved, but it began to help us out to the point of where we just like, Man, I think it's more price conscience for us and our client, if we would come up with a certain scale. And so it's cheaper for most people to do business with us for 72 pieces or below to do direct to film. It gets cheaper for them for the vast more of 72 and more to screen print. So we offer them both surfaces, and they can pick and choose which one they want. What we found out is, most people go, Well, I can do as many colors as I want to with the DTF. I'm going to go to DTF. So what happens was, about 35 to 40% of our screen printing business was took away from us, and it went into DTF because we're doing all those smaller jobs now, with a whole lot less setup time and a lot less employees, because you got one person sitting up the job, and one person man in the machine, and then you have one person that heat presses it on. And so those people are not always working simultaneously, but you know, somebody will go print them all, and then they'll sit there, somebody cut it, and then it Wait, and somebody come in from that department and they'll print it. So basically, you have one person doing the labor on those 72 piece garment where, if you're on our big, you know, 1020, or 1316, you got four employees down there setting up a job to run 72 pieces. And then they got to tear it down, clean the squeegees, get ready, you know, he's got to go back to the screen wash it's got to get a motion put back on, and you got to reuse it. So you got all that labor and time involved on something that one person could do. And so when we started seeing that, we immediately kind of reverse focus on small jobs, and especially when you do in restaurants or uniforms or, you know, you got a boutique that needs 24 pieces. Or you got somebody want a test field, a design they just want to do about 48 pieces before they run a big job. The direct to film machine, man, it's the way to go, and it always looks right. The colors are always vibrant. It's guaranteed for 50 washes, just like screen printing is. And so I became a huge fan overnight, because. I realized how much money it was saving me and almost how much money it was making.

Marshall Atkinson 
And so are you using, like the dual shuttle, or some of these other newer machines for the heat transfer, where you can do a lot of them per hour?

James Bowens 
Yes sir, we do have, and I will call any brands, because, for the sake of, you know, advertising, but we have dual heads that one person, if they do it right in their train ride, they could do about 120 shirts an hour on that machine. And it's all push button, air, press down. So there's no raising, moving, there's lasers. You can load it perfect every time. And so when you get one person over there doing 120 shirts an hour, and there's no setup time. It's hard to beat especially talking about an eight color job, or a four color job, or 10 color job.

Marshall Atkinson 
Right. Yeah, well, or 1000 color job, because it's DTF digital, it can be anything, right?

James Bowens 
And it's typically, I know ours is, it's a water based ink, and it has a little powder glue that goes on there. We've had stuff we put through the ringer because we plot. We provide apparel for our people to wear with our branding on it when they work. And we've watched some of these things, you know, more than 50 times, and they still look as good as an new, you know. So right? I'm a big fan of it. We only have one forehead machine that does about 200 to 300 prints an hour, and we're probably going to buy our second before two months longer, just because that one stays working all the time. Yeah, so...

Marshall Atkinson
Well, you can't swing a dead count in a trade show without hitting the DTF machines, right? And, and I think it's really gonna it's really revolutionizing the way people work. And also think about art as well, you know, like I've got my little bromance I'm doing with Midjourney right now, which is all about AI image creation, and that's really set up well for anything that's printing with digital because, you know, you can, you can use the whole color palette, And you can do some really amazing things and and so have you guys thought, Is it part of your process now, where, because you're not limited to colors, are you finding that you can be more creative with your artwork? Are you seeing that and that's led to some more sales and bigger volume things, or more repeat business or anything like that?

James Bowens 
Yeah, I believe so. For instance, we did a job last year. It was the end of the season for Alabama softball, and they sent us a photograph of the coaches and all the girls together, and they wanted to do 500 shirts to do a giveaway. And typically, 500 shirts we're going to screen print, there's no doubt about it, but I ran a sample on the DTF, just because I wanted to see what it looked like. And, you know, although I've been screen printing for right at 20 years, I knew I couldn't make it look like that. And that was a big turning point for me, because I realized this machine is better than I am, you know, from a standpoint of how you separated sitting up in the screen. Because, you know, Montana Fauci, which is their star player at the time, pitcher, one of my favorite players. You know, she's on the cover, and she has a little mole here, and you could see it. She had on a cross pendant. You could see it. The Alabama A in the glove was fine. You could make out the brand of the glove. You could see the the stubble on the coach's side of this face, of his hair. You know, it was so detailed. I was like, We gotta run a DTF. So we ran a DTF. I hand delivered it to him. Tuscaloosa is two and a half hours from here. I was going there for the weekend to watch the last games, anyway, and we hand delivered it. And from the marketing director to some of the players, everybody was like, This is the greatest shirt we ever had. We've got to have some more of these for ourselves to keep, because it looked just like the picture. It was amazing.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah. And that really sets you apart from other people, yeah, when somebody says, this is the best shirt I've ever received, right? Everything is compared to that from now on.

James Bowens 
Yeah, well, we did a job not too long ago for a client. We did it DTF, and they called back and needed a job, and we couldn't get to it in the turnaround time that they needed, and sadly, we had to refuse it, which is something we don't like to do, but we had already had some other things promised, because typically we're one week to three weeks out in every department we got, you know, sometimes we can move things around to make it happen. Sometimes we can, but at this particular point we couldn't, so they used another person that screen printed it for them, and the screen printing job was great. I seen the shirt, but they bring us back our DTF shirt and the screen printed shirt. It's like, hey, you know, this is great, but this DTF shirt is so much better. What's your turnaround time? We need to get more shirts, and we just don't want to do it screen printed. We want to do it DTF because the colors the way it failed. Davis just sold on it and and. I do get there are some people who don't like DTF. They don't like the feel of it. They want an old fashioned screen printing. And that's great. We do water based, we do discharge, we do plastic sauce so we can get it smooth. You know, we have rollers and irons and presses to try to give us the best look we can on screen printing. But there's certain things, in my opinion, DTF just does a better job of.

Marshall Atkinson 
The hand of a DTF is all controlled by the adhesive glue, so a finer, green adhesive gives you a softer hand Absolutely. And I've seen at trade shows and other companies deal with DTF print that you can't feel at all, and it's just because it's, it's using, you know, it's all the consumables, right? And just like a with a screenprint, you know, what goes into the print, you know, you know, the all the how you bake the cake really matters, right? And so, you know, so that's something to keep in mind, if you guys are listening, is, you know, if you're trying DTF, try to find a really finer grain adhesive if you don't like the hand, because the the coarser green adhesive makes the has the more plasticky feel, if you will. So something to keep in mind? Uh, well, cool. So thank you for sharing your story of success with us today. James, right? What's the best way to contact you if someone wants to learn more about what you do or maybe how Print Villains can help them?

James Bowens 
Well, probably the easiest way to get a hold of me is just email me. That's James Bowens, that's J, A, M, E, S, B, O, W, E, N, S @me.com, and I will definitely get back with you. That's the easiest way you can Google us or whatever in Print Villains, I think we're come up on the first page, so we're easy to find. You're welcome to call in talk to any of our specialists. You know, we love to help, but if you have questions or need help with something we're passionate about it. I believe there's enough money in the world for everybody, so we don't mind helping people. We don't think we're the only person in the world that can do it. And so we try to have friends in the screen printing industry, because I have been there where I needed help with jobs, and somebody helped me. And I've been there where I had to contract out stuff to other people because I couldn't get to it, and so I think we're better together than we are apart. So feel free to reach out to us anytime. We'd love to help you in any way we could.

Marshall Atkinson 
Well, that's great. So well, right? Hey, thanks, James, appreciate you, and we'll talk to you guys later.

James Bowens 
 Alright, thanks again, Marshall.