
What We're Doing Different This Year
Last year was... interesting. We started off 2024 ordering our garments from a print shop and mid-way through the year, made a decision to switch over to printing them ourselves... WITH ZERO EXPERIENCE. I spent the month of August last year watching YouTube videos, making mistakes, and learning the entire screen printing process from start to finish. I have an MBA and over a decade of sales experience in soft goods and the energy industry. I was NOT qualified to be printing shirts! However, I will say that when I put my mind to something, I will figure it out. Somehow between August 1st and August 28th, I'd printed hundreds of hoodies and tees to bring with us to our eighth in-person event of the year in Batavia, NY (Side note - they have an AMAZING airshow there every year over the Labor Day weekend and will be hosting the World Aerobatic Championships in August of 2026). I may write another post detailing learning to screen print in volume in less than a month from start to finish - but this is not that post.
For the next 11 weeks, I spent weekdays designing, printing, and packing - most of which were 10-14 hour work days, and I spent weekends working our in-person events. Not to mention all of our normal business activities that I was doing before I started printing. As you can imagine, it went from being a new skill that I was proud to have learned so quickly, to work I dreaded doing because the fun creative process was taken over by long work days of repetitive tasks. Not my cup of tea (or coffee in my case). Since we don't want to push the printing back to a print shop (I have wonderful recommendations for local print shops in Nashville, TN) for many reasons, we needed to spread out the inventory build-up for our in-person events over a longer period of time. Therefore, we'll be attending fewer in-person events this year, but we'll be able to bring more creative merch and have enough inventory to not sell out the first day. Any event specific merch that doesn't sell out by the end of the weekend will be then shared to our online store with what inventory remains, but we won't be re-stocking it. This is going to give us an opportunity to be fun and creative with the in-person events this year.
You can check out our 2025 in-person events here. I have a feeling some locations might be added to the calendar this year because, well, I just know me.
See ya on the road!