man one of those days!

[Frog]

So far this week we've had 3 instances (not including this one), of clients just approving the mock up with out looking at it or reading it.

Im not sure what else to do. maybe hold their hand a bit, and walk them through it even more and charge it as a premium service.

This isn't new, but I think that it is increasing with the growth of dumb people, using smart phones for everything. Not only are images tiny compared to a real screen, but many folks don't even scroll down to see an attached image!

[bimmridder]

We just had one yesterday. This made it by everybody in the shop, which is almost understandable, but it also made it through Properties and customer approvals. We were literally pulling the second to the last piece off the press when an artist came lumbering out to the floor. He had a comp in his hand and said we can't run it yet. The shirt had Double A Baseball instead of AAA Baseball. There's a 72 piece mistake we eat. The only saving grace is it didn't make it to the customer. 

[tpitman]

Worst I ever did was for a powderpuff football t-shirt. I fixed their art and reset the type. Sent a proof and got the sign-off.
Printed over 200 royal, gold and black shirts. The next night I was drinking beer and happened to look over at the stack, and noticed it said "POWDERFUFF". I waited until the next morning to assure sobriety was engaged and double-checked. Yup. POWDERFUFF.
The good news was I discovered it before I'd cut and heat-pressed all of the names and numbers for the back. Had to replace the shirts, but I had time and still made money on the job. I've STILL got a stack of those shirts I'm using as set-ups since 2007.

[mimosatexas]

I've only had one of these mistakes fortunately.  Changed "2nd" to "3nd" instead of "3rd".  Made it past me, the client (always send and get approval before, but he missed it), my cousin who was helping, and my wife.  I am literally photographing the sample shirt I ran for myself about 10 minutes before the guy is coming to pick them up and look at the photo on my screen and go "oh crap".  I was able to match the shirt color and mask it with a little ink to make the "n" look like an "r", but still a pain.

[Inkworks]

Mistakes like that are always caught in the last 10% of the run, never on the second shirt. I have a big stack of "Grandfondo" shirts for set-ups. Who knew "Granfondo" only had 1 "D" 

[Dochertyscott]

Once printed a job on x300  heavy ski jackets...already had a press on logo (which was mostly falling off from last printer.) Had to print the words "sponsored by" above in a horrible zip fold cover thingy...in a small space. So busy messing with jigs and nylobag ink missed the fact that it was spelt "sposored by" a valued client came up and was hesitant to tell me the typo after bragged about my fine print and I showed him the terrible job the last printer had done on the transfer logo.... Thank god it was air dry ink and we scrubbed it off with spirits and over printed it. Wow! Too close.
I think I have insurance for that sort of thing though? I've never had to claim but have vague recollection of my policy having it included? Anyone else have insurance for freak ups?

[abchung]

Last December had to go to a customer with my head sales guy to apologise for a stupid mistake. (Print guy used a different type of ink, and did not do a wash test, the ink just falls off during the first wash).

During the meeting my sales guy stopped talking and the customer went silent. I could not stand the silence and said "100% it is our fault, not yours. I accept full responsibility. I will cover all cost, I am very sorry for the trouble". Customer tone changed and had a smile ear to ear for the rest of the meeting.

1500 full size print shirts... ...

[beanie357]

The small screen phone thing is rampant. I am almost 60 and can't see for crap on these damm smart-a$$ phones.

How about a discharge job they did not want washed to get the soft hand, were reminded of, then tell you that you did not print discharge? We offer large batch washing as well through our other company.

So let's see. Small screens, no scroll down, approve what they do not look at, forget the caveats on technique and discharge jobs, can't spell to begin with, yep, just another day in the salt mine.

Oh, forgot, how about sticker on dtg noting may need to wash Garment if there is a pretreat shadow, which is on every shirt, but they call anyway, even though they are shown the possibility?

[Croft]

how come we all have a 6th sense, I have set jobs up ran a few and just stop to check or review even after a proof and have found mistakes, Its really a weird feeling when you sense something is wrong.

Oh and my most embarrassing is  "Cananada" day shirts that got to press , luckily printer only did a few before catching it .  That one haunted me for years in the shop

[mk162]

i did brown on a royal shirt last year and i was so worried it would get rejected.  It didn't thankfully and the customer LOVED them.

It's hard to use your taste on something that is for somebody else, since you never know what they think looks great and really what they are after in a print.

I've never done black on black though.

[jvanick]

funny story about this...

a customer came to me a few weeks ago asking me to print a bunch of shirts for him saying 'Division Chams'

turns out, about 15 years ago, they were celebrating that they were the Division Champs... nobody noticed that the shirts said Division Chams on them until AFTER they passed them out to all their members... ended up becoming an internal joke for them.

They had me print a run of them to celebrate hitting that status again.

[Sbrem]

We had a customer refuse a job last week that we sent a proof to but apparently they didn't look at it.  Simple white print on assorted colors and a certain text part of their logo was dropped recently and nobody told us so we sent them a proof of their logo that we've done for them several different times over the years and they approved it and said run it.  Then when they came to pick up they said the text at the top of their logo wasn't supposed to be there.  They asked that we eat the cost of the reprint entirely since they would like to keep using us for their screen printing.  They spend less than $300 a year with us so we politely declined to reprint their job for free and offered to reprint at a discount and they could buy the misprints if they wanted at our cost.  They didn't want to do that even though they didn't do their part of the process and there really isn't much else we could have done.

You're right Alan, we would do the same. $300 a year can be lost, especially if there is no profit, or worse, a loss.

Steve

[swiftees]

New to posts...funny story for us....we got a customer that needed family reunion shirts. The family was Italian, so they  wanted the Italian flag with the family name and year...simple. we printed and delivered.  Got a call about a week AFTER the reunion saying it was  the best ever and thanked us for converting them to Italian Mexicans! We had unknowing flipped the ink colors during production on the flag...Making it a Mexican flag instead of Italian.lol. Customer thankfully found it to be funny.. so we were safe!

[Evo]

Our shop never makes mistakes. Ever.

WTF is wrong with you people.

[mimosatexas]

how come we all have a 6th sense, I have set jobs up ran a few and just stop to check or review even after a proof and have found mistakes, Its really a weird feeling when you sense something is wrong.

Oh and my most embarrassing is  "Cananada" day shirts that got to press , luckily printer only did a few before catching it .  That one haunted me for years in the shop

I would have run with that one!  Might be a huge hit