Bad Prints Gallery

[JBLUE]

From many trips to the garment district in L.A. I can tell you that there are a lot of printers that just dont care. There are so many print shops down there that just get it close and go.

I have a buddy that runs 750k to over a million prints for a very popular customer a month and I give him crap all the time because their stuff is always out of reg. I can go into any of the big chains and grab one of his shirts and most of the time they are off. He just says nobody ever complains so they dont mess with it. It is what it is when they want it for nothing.

[Dottonedan]

I hear what you're saying Jblue. It's not supposed to happen and a good shop/QC/manager/Owner is on top of that easier for small to medium shops and even some big ones. We all know we are responsible for what we produce. I have seen/heard production managers with the feeling that we are such a machine that when something bad is caught, you stop it from proceeding. In the same breath, I've heard them say, and what happens about the stuff that already shipped, well, I guess we will find out later". Often times we never hear complaints. I worked at the screen print facility at a very large shop for 1 year, then hired on at the design dept for 11 more years. In that time, I've never heard of them coming back on a printer for something that was already in the stores. Never.  I even tried to point out something that was horrible, on the shelves and consistent between re-orders. and was taught in my training class" to do yet, was told to not bother with it. It's "out of my area".  Thats how it goes. Thats realitee with big shops.

I remember my co workers telling me early on, if you wanna get along here, you eat the pooh samich on your plate. You don't get a better pooh samich. You get what you get and the Co tells you it's a really good pooh samich and you are supposed to agree and believe it. Thats the dark side of the bis boys. I'm sure some of that is at all levels. Some of your employees might feel the same way in the screen room or on press.

Shut up and eat your pooh samich.  Ha!.  Sounds sad. It is sad we have company's that run that way and we have many of them. I'm glad I'm out.

Here's how sneaky the corporate side is. While working for a fortune 500 Co. I was being courted and eventually hired by another of even larger size. So, I made my intentions known and soon, not the owner or one of the board, but a senior level exec came to me and ask me to stay. Now, I thought I must be in pretty big demand. Heck this "exec" is meeting with me face to face from the corporate office and offers me oh. Probably another 5-10,000 to stay. I don't remember now but it wasn't that substantial. I do remember him telling me how bad the gins are in where i was going and I should reconsider. The Co. I was being hired by was (in my mind at the time) a chance of a life time so I stayed the course for the new Co. I went to work for this other big company and a month later, the previous Company totally SHUT DOWN that entire division I was in. Nothing left of it. They completely moved out of that town of laid off everyone. So, the sneaky part is, this Exec already knew of this. Stuff like that doesn't happen over night. It's being developed for months or years in the making. In additon to the sneakyness, lies the fact that it turns out my new employer is heavily in cahoots with the previous Co that just shut down my old division and were in the midst of negotiated bad contracts between the two. Legal stuff. So, somewhere, I felt like a pawn. I don't know where exactly, but it still feels dirty. The connection didn't stop there. It went on into the great debacle of 1999 and is yet another story.

Ok. Off topic.  Bring me back.

[alan802]

I allso think as some of you that if you say you never let a bad print out your shop your lying or just didn't see it.  Lets look at it this way what you feel might be a jam of a print reggie tight as goats lips might not look good to someone else, that goes for all of us that think everything we do is perfect.  I ,ve seen some bad prints for sure and have did some myself mine you I work like hell for it not to be, I allso think we as printers put a lot of pressure on oursevles to product the best we can (and we should) but the end user sometimes could care less they just want a print on a shirt as cheap as they can get it.  The shop that prints a 1000 shirts and all 1000 is out of register and they didn't care now thats a bad printer or they didn't take the time to cure them correct and  you only get a one time wear before all the ink washes off.

Darryl
Good topic by the way!!!!

We could argue all day about what is a bad print and we'd all have a different version but let's take the closeup pic of the first print as our guide.  I'm not lying nor have I just missed it, but nothing that far out of registration has been put in a box and left this building. I can say that because the first 5 years, I printed every garment.  Now I don't see every garment but I've got a printer that is as detailed as I am when it comes to registration, not so much in print technique but when it comes to getting a job registered he goes above and beyond.  My catcher is really good at catching something that the puller missed because he loves to brag about finding something that got by my printer or whoever is unloading.  My printer and screen guy don't get along so any chance my screen guy has to stick it to the printer he takes great enjoyment out of that.  I no longer see every print that goes out the door but I've got a great crew that is very capable of picking up where I left off.  I still look at every job at some point during the print process and several times a day I'll open a box to check it out.

Does anyone have any comments on the youth prints versus adult?  Don't tell me I'm the only one who has noticed.

[Dottonedan]

  I'm not lying nor have I just missed it, but nothing that far out of registration has been put in a box and left this building.

How do you know if you've missed it or not? Isn't that the point of "missing it"?  LOL.

You have your "one guy" who prints and your "one guy who catches and your "one guy" who.....  as you get bigger, you will lose touch with your perfect quality control.  I hope you stick to your guns and I hope you really are a perfect operating machine. That would be cool.

As a Christian, I am to have to goal to be "Christ like" and be perfect, but will I really ever get there?  No, but that does not mean I stray from the path but it's a goal.

[3Deep]

Alan I would not dought one bit that you take care to give your customers top notch products, I,m just saying sometimes when some of us get to rocking and rolling things can get missed.  I seen some bad work and the people still go right back to that same printer for more of the same... price and they like dealing with them.

Darryl

[inkman996]

I have to say registering is the easy part and should be easy for any shop big or small. Print technique amd quality is certainly more involved and requires some sort of talent. No way in hell do I ever print a job miss registered there is no reason for it at all.

My guess as to why these big shops that print for the retailers with such crappy reg is that they all use some type of reg system, they rely on these systems from burn to print, they slap the screens in butt up on the reg board and clamp the screens and print . These are huge shops printing for pennies with barely pennies an hour labor, time is money for them even a couple minutes per set up. That's my take.

Oh and by the way a reg system if used correctly y could allow you to drop the screens in and print but if the person lining up the films is not perfect then the screens will not be perfect ith out micro ing.

[Shawn (EIP)]

The average consumer is used to crap , I mean look at all the crappy prints being sold even high dollar tees in the mall. I'm not saying put out crap but I think we as printers look too hard into things and maybe have a little too much pride in our work. Makes you wonder if reburning those screens to fix something minor is really worth it...     

[RICK STEFANICK]

O.K Here is a senerio. its thursday night and your finishing a job on american apparel tees and on the last print location your white underbase screen runs out of ink. the customer is picking up the shirts at 9 am for a event that day and to get more shirts it will monday. you can run it around  a additional time or two to get the coverage  and the print will look great but is bulletproof. the customer will not notice and  be happy and not say a thing. what are you gonna do? i already know! but isnt that a quality issue? yes but it falls within the loose industry standards we are talking about here and we have all done it.same thing as the guy running with the registration issue..just sayin

[JBLUE]

O.K Here is a senerio. its thursday night and your finishing a job on american apparel tees and on the last print location your white underbase screen runs out of ink. the customer is picking up the shirts at 9 am for a event that day and to get more shirts it will monday. you can run it around  a additional time or two to get the coverage  and the print will look great but is bulletproof. the customer will not notice and  be happy and not say a thing. what are you gonna do? i already know! but isnt that a quality issue? yes but it falls within the loose industry standards we are talking about here and we have all done it.same thing as the guy running with the registration issue..just sayin

This is a little different than what we are talking about. We are talking about large numbers of F-ups. Stuff that is printed that way from the start. Have I done what you talked about? Yes for sure. The print was a little heavy but it was still in registration and to the lay person it was still a really great print. We are talking about the crap that is in retail.

As for your above scenario. I dont put myself in that situation. For us to do a 24 hour turn it is going to be expensive and I am going to order extras. Extras will be printed and billed as an overage. Its part of the rush deal. Everything is explained to the customer. Even Murphy's law is explained to them. A plan B is always discussed so that there is no surprise at 9 am. If we screw up the whole carousal of shirts then they may not get an AA shirt but what they do get will be registered.

[alan802]

I don't understand why it's hard to believe a small operation like ours that does 4-8 jobs a day and 1000-4000 shirts a week wouldn't let something out the door that looked like those prints I posted. I've conceded that I don't know how larger ops work but managing something our size and qc is a breeze.  Technically I could look at every shirt now but the good thing is I don't have to.  Like mike said, registration is the easy part, and if something goes out the door with the ub showing like that first shirt is carelessness regardless of the shop size.  It's still one job per press and some guy/girls setting up and doing things exactly like we all do it, there is just more presses and employees to handle.  I'm not trying to diminish what the big shops do but we are still comparing the same process not screen printing versus theoretical physics.  As the numbers get larger it gets less feasible to qc like we do, so what do you do about it?   Well I think you have to have better control over all the variables and you better have employees who give a damn.  There is obviously a lot more to it than that but we dont have all night.

[JBLUE]

Alan. Great point. Hire the right people and you dont have to worry as much. Its going to happen eventually but we can still do everything in our power to stop it.

[alan802]

  I'm not lying nor have I just missed it, but nothing that far out of registration has been put in a box and left this building.

How do you know if you've missed it or not? Isn't that the point of "missing it"?  LOL.

You have your "one guy" who prints and your "one guy who catches and your "one guy" who.....  as you get bigger, you will lose touch with your perfect quality control.  I hope you stick to your guns and I hope you really are a perfect operating machine. That would be cool.

As a Christian, I am to have to goal to be "Christ like" and be perfect, but will I really ever get there?  No, but that does not mean I stray from the path but it's a goal.

Being a perfect print shop isn't possible just like you being a perfect person isn't possible, but not letting really poor work like the above out of a shop like ours doesn't require perfection.  It requires having control over as many variables as possible, having good employees that care about what they do and many other things.  If we can do one job with high quality then why can't they all be of the same or better quality?  Completely possible at our shop without being perfect.  Good luck in your pursuit though Dan, I gave up a long time ago.

We are not all on the same page here and I'm arguing something slightly different and subjectivity is also causing some issues.  I get what you guys are saying about why some of this occurs, but what about the rest of it?  Not all of the poor prints are coming from massive operations and they come from shops like ours too, and that is my main argument.  I went to the ISS Ft. Worth last year and I saw two guys wearing their company's screen printed shirts, their logo and text underneath.  I kid you not, the underbase was showing worse than first print on this thread!  Black shirts, neon green print with white UB, you could see the white from 10 yards away.  These two guys probably owned the business and to this day I think they were doing a bit, trying to get a laugh out of people because there is no way someone would wear their own advertisement around that was that bad.  I took a pic of it t the time and I can't find it now.  I remember telling Donnie about it at the show.

We have bad days like everyone else, but not as bad as the bad prints at my local grocery store. There isn't anything there that I would consider above average technically speaking.   

[Dottonedan]

I do believe that a shop your size can be held to tight QC down to an estimate of 98% possible flawless product. I won't give anoyone 100%. Not even me.

[mk162]

Dan, that is understandable, since your spelling runs at about 50% accuracy.   I couldn't help it.

Crap, my prices just went up.  I'll just order everything under Pierre's account, but not tell him about it either.

[whitewater]

hey alan....I have a theory why the babies and youth are better prints....

On adults if the print looks good 6 ft away its good to go...(like you said in your first post)

On youth and babies the print has to be better because everyone is up close squeezing the the babies cheeks or patting the kids on their heads telling them how cute they are...

No one wants to get that close to an adult....LOL

Just a theory....HAHA!