My name is Justin and together with my wife Erin, we are the co-owners of Barrel Maker, a print shop in Chicago, Illinois.
While we may have a lot of customers that place a lot of large orders, when I say that we have very humble beginnings, I mean it.
When we first started the company, we worked out of our 3rd floor apartment. If you’ve ever screen printed before, you know that it’s an understatement to say your home is not where you should do it.
Especially, as in our case, when your house is actually a two-bedroom apartment and you print in your living room.
Screen printing is messy – even messier than the toddler we had crawling around the place.
We lost our security deposit because our bathroom was our washout for rinsing out and cleaning screens. Our bathtub was completely stained with emulsion and ink. No amount of cleaning was going to save it.
It wasn’t pretty, but neither is starting a business.
Some of my fondest memories to look back on are the hardest times we had, but persevered through.
Like when we had a huge hole in our roof during the wintertime and literally had a massive snow pile in our shop. Or pulling all-nighters to print for a festival the next day, or watching Erin print thousands of shirts manually on an old beat up press with a baby strapped onto her back.
How we got our start in screen printing
What happened was we saw a really dumb kids shirt on the computer while we were looking for clothes for our brand new baby Cooper (BTW Cooper is named after Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks. A person who makes barrels by trade is called a Cooper, so that’s where the name Barrel Maker came from!).
We were laughing at the designs they were so bad. And we figured, what the heck let’s come up with some of our own designs.
We whipped some together using our untraded graphic design skills, threw together a website, and went for it. We had a few designs printed and drove around town to try and get into retail stores. We had just started to make our own kid’s designs and were thrifting shirts and having them turned into toddler dresses too.
At the time, I had a job based around real estate. When the housing market crashed, I got laid off and used my very first unemployment check to buy a super small printing press online.
Neither of us had any idea how to use the press. We didn’t take screen printing in school or have an art background.
I’m pretty sure Erin was upset that I bought it, but I started to tell everyone I knew how we had this amazing new print shop, and I started to get random orders here and there.
We’ve made every mistake that you can possibly make over the years. In the beginning, it was trial by fire all the time.
And that’s the cool thing about the screen printing business. You get a lot of opportunities to try and if you are persistent and learn from the mistakes, you can figure it out.
What do we love about screen printing t-shirts?
I am fond of screen printing on a few different levels.
From a business perspective, it’s just an easy tangible product we can offer that appeals to just about everyone.
I’ve never been an overly aggressive sales type, but liked to approach potential customers by showing them something that I think would appeal to them to capture their interest so that they want to work with Barrel Maker rather than me cold calling them every day.
For example, if I can reach out to a business to show them a shirt that is made in an ethical manner (like Allmade) that complements the way their business functions and I also happen to have a sample that’s utilizing a brand I think they’d be familiar with or with a really high-quality print on it, I feel confident that they’ll be able to see their brand taking a similar path.
Then the fun part of showing off all the various options we can create takes over.
With screen printing, there is just so much ability to create something unique. From the wide array of ink colors, brands, and effects to the multitude of ways you can print the same thing with different techniques (pressure, screens, etc.) to get different outcomes.
This touches more on what I love about printing from a hands-on standpoint. I love to look at an image and picture in my head how I think it should feel or if some colors should stand out more than others.
Then I can choose mesh counts and ink types to try and obtain my initial goal, but ultimately I’ll get setup on press and try some different things and typically come up with a different way to print than anticipated. Maybe thinning a color out while printing another color with multiple strokes and a really light amount of pressure.
The zen of repetition takes over and for me allows me to think about things going on in my life while my body continues with the motions necessary to repeatedly print shirt after shirt consistently.
I don’t understand what it is about the process but I really do just feel good doing it. It’s simple and complicated and just the right amount of manual labor to be sustainable for long periods of time.
There is nothing boring about screen printing. Even with our automated presses, screen printing is very hands-on.
While at times it can be frustrating, I love the challenge of troubleshooting the problems and creating a physical product. This, to me, makes screen printing endlessly interesting.
It also helps that I’ve built up an extremely high stress tolerance!
T-shirts have captured the zeitgeist of our generation. I appreciate that and love being a part of it.
We are more than just t-shirt makers!
I’m still extremely hands-on with the printing at Barrel Maker, working daily with our production managers and the rest of the production team frequently as well.
While I identify as a screen printer, I definitely consider Erin and myself small business owners. There is a lot of responsibility that comes with that role.
When you hire somebody full time to work for you it’s serious, and I feel I owe my entire team the assurance that I’m going to be all in all the time.
We now have more employees than we ever thought we would. Employees that we owe a lot to and feel accountable for.
At the end of the day, we want to work with people that we actually enjoy talking with, people that take pride in their work, and people that share the same values as us.
Creating a meaningful, fulfilling workplace is the best part of what we do.
If you’re looking for a screen print shop that cares about your shirts as much as you do, you’ve found it.
We’d love to work with you. Reach out to us today to see how we can help – email us (info@barrelmakerprinting.com) or fill out our contact form online.