THE BEGINNING OF IT ALL
The best way to start is to fail. My sophomore year of high school, we had a silk screening session in my home economics class. We used Speedball inks, hand-cut vinyl lacquer adhere stencils, and actual silk screens stretched over a frame with a cord. If a screen was successfully made, you would have the chance to put it on the 1987 Startline Hopkins International press and flash it off with a BBC flash dryer.
I say "if" because the process of cutting out the stencil resulted in a broken screen and a little blood on the shirt, so my first attempt to make a shirt failed. My friend and drummer of our first band did, however, make his shirt successfully. I remember the shirt vividly; it had a girl's bathroom sign, and I thought it was so cool. That memory stuck with me over the next few years.
Our band changed and started to get more “legitimate,” recording our first EP in 1999. Over the summer, as we were getting ready to play our first concert, I remembered that t-shirt and thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have some merch to sell! So, I contacted my school and my Home Economics teacher, Revis Belin, and asked if I could come by and make some t-shirts. He said yes, and soon I was at the school with a bag of white CK shirts purchased from a discount retailer, making a screen for my first screen print.
This time, with more on the line, I successfully cut and applied the stencil, put the screen in that 1987 Hopkins press, printed a shirt, and cured it with that BBC flash dryer. There is no other feeling like seeing your first shirt come off the press—something that was blank and then was printed. As many a screen printer I have met says, once inks under your fingers, you can’t get it out.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
Realizing This Was a REAL Business: I remember in May of 2005 moving into our first commercial space and selling over 500k in a month. Realizing, one year into this, that we had a real business.
Meeting Riley Hopkins in Spring 2005: My wife Amanda and I drove up to Gig Harbor, stopped at Ikea along the way to pick up a lot of new office furniture for our new building, and then drove down to Riley Hopkins' garage. It was a garage! I was blown away, expecting a big factory, but it was just like our garage at the time. That press changed Ryonet because it was the first legitimate press we sold, and with a legitimate press, a screen printer can print legitimate t-shirts. It was definitely the catalyst for our next growth stage.
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Growing Through the Great Recession of 2008-2010: We not only grew but surpassed 20 million in sales.
Bringing in ROQ in 2012.
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Powering the Print Brand Development: This was probably the coolest experience I can remember out of my entire Ryonet journey. It happened around 2014 or 2015.
Purchasing and Launching ScreenPrinting.com.
Starting Allmade in 2016.
MADE to Make It in 2016.
Transitioning Both of Those Companies to Partners with SanMar and ROQ International in 2020.
LESSONS LEARNED
Solve Problems: Having learned how to screen print the hard way, it was always CORE to help our customers learn the right way. Being there and helping them learn and solve their problems was key.
Serve: Customer service is the DNA of Ryonet. We are nothing without helping that next shirt be printed, and we will go above and beyond to help make that happen—always have, always will.
Be the Best at Being Better: This phrase was coined by our first customer and old team member Cobb Hudjohn. Always learn and improve in what you do personally and what the company does globally every day.
FUTURE GOALS
I have always dreamed that Ryonet, and now the family of companies around Ryonet, would be an industry-leading force. We have done it for those who have wanted to start, and some of those companies have grown up to become the biggest in our industry. But we still have a way to go to rival this industry's titans of business. However you measure it—by units, by revenue, by how many shirts we touch annually—when you think of a t-shirt, we want to be the first group that you think of because we have and continue to be the leader in innovation, growth, sustainability, and social responsibility to make it happen.
