Where Did January Go?

Hey guys!

Your friendly neighborhood Renegades here, and can you believe that it's already well into February? WTF right?

A lot of things happened this last month and downtown LA has been buzzin with activity. Lot's of people expressing themselves with printed materials (if you catch our drift). We're always happy to lend a hand to those who feel the need to wear their opinion on their shirt.

We have a feeling we'll be printing more stuff like this in the coming months. Stay tuned.

We also had a chance to get to ISS last month and check all the latest and greatest in garment decoration as well as taking in some seminars and classes to bone up on our skills. It was cool to see screen printers and other garment decorators from all over the country there in different capacities as well as some familiar faces. It was a very wet weekend but we managed to get a picture while it was nice and sunny out.

Hopefully we'll see some you at the next one. In the mean time, we have orders coming in what seems to be non-stop so if you need us, we'll be manning the presses making sure we crank out these jobs to make way for the new ones!!

The End of Another Year...

Hey Guys!

We know we know, it’s been a WHOLE YEAR, literally, since we’ve gotten a new post up on our blog but we’re looking to change that for 2017. Print Renegades has been growing and growing and we are SO busy (especially for the holidays) that posting on the blog has not been the priority that it should be. Now that we have a full time marketing and social media guy to assist in this, we will definitely be more up and out of our shells to bring you guys the new and improved Renegades!!

Since last December, we have expanded our team to include some new faces to keep production in our shop running like a well-oiled machine and to make sure we stay active on social media and the web. We’ve got a new kick-ass DTG printer, the Epson F2000, that we’ve definitely been putting through its paces these last 12 months and have got it running almost non-stop with our ever-growing job board for Direct-To-Garment print jobs.

Along with DTG business, screen print jobs have not slowed down a tick and we’re constantly pushing ourselves to work outside of our comfort zone from printing oversized flatstock to printing on materials we’ve never printed on before. Our aim is to always say YES! And as you might hear from our customers, we usually do!

Keep your eyes on this blog for a deeper dive into what we’ve been up to and what’s going on at Print Renegades in the future. We have a lot of new equipment were purchasing at the end of this year (tax breaks!!!) and another 1-2 employees we are currently trying to hire to be able to stay ahead of our job schedules, and were super excited to bring all of these new occurences to light coming in 2017. (its weird to write...wow!). Also, keep checking us out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for more behind the scenes stuff! (we post on those more than once a year, we promise!) :)

The Price Is Wrong, Bitch!!

Printing sometimes can be really fun! We were hit up by a few friends to print their shirts for The Price Is Right. (everyone has to go at least once, right??). And, of course who else did they call than Print Renegades! (although our main focus is more about helping artists, start ups, restaurants, non profits and clothing brands, sometimes its fun to do something silly and fun).

The print was actually pretty complicated, a 4 color screen print WITH Foil (and only 10 pieces). Normally our minimum order of 10 pieces is for 1 or 2 color designs, but we made an exception from 25 pcs (3-4 color prints) to 10 pieces for these kids.

Printing with foil inside of a design, where not everything is getting foiled, is difficult because the ink around the part not being foiled has to be a different type of ink than the ink that is being foiled. Now, foil normally sticks to any oil based ink, so the ink around the foil design has to be either 1: Waterbased ink or 2: has to be ink with Foil-Resist additive in it...either of these things will allow the foil to stick ONLY to the oil-based plastisol ink and not to everything else.

And as you can see here, the final result looks pretty amazing!! AND you can see the shirts IN action, getting called up to the stage of the Price IS Right HERE. (pretty snazzy!!)
 

"Yeezus for President" Art Prints

Yeezus For President in 2020!!! This is a throwback to some prints we did roughly a year ago. We were able to work with Donda Productions, and we actually did TWO versions of this print (one as a THREE color with GLOW in the dark ink, shown below, and one as a TWO color with Metallic Gold instead of White).

They turned our very radical, and were printed as a very limited edition of 100. We were happy, and we still see them selling online for mucho dinero! :)

Reliance Umbrellas

Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co. is a metal distributor in Los Angeles. The company started in the late 1930's in the postwar metal industry boom.  It was listed in Fortune's List of "Most Admired Companies". 

 Print Renegades was thrilled to work with a Los Angeles icon. The job: To screen print on patio umbrellas! This wasn't just a T-shirt one could thread and easily work on, this took time and thought. We had to be precise, working with that large of fabric. It took multiple people to make sure each umbrella was flawless. After the umbrella was printed, we had to fit it into our dryer. Making sure the fabric didn't scorch and the ink dried thoroughly. It was an exhausting job however, it's projects like these that make us love our jobs. We are always ecstatic to have new and interesting projects, where we can showcase our knowledge of the trade. 

The umbrellas turned out great. We hope Reliance can keep their employees and customers cool this summer! 

New PR Website Coming....!!

We are more than thrilled to have a new website coming soon! Literally we hired our website designers and developers back in November of 2013...almost 20 MONTHS AGO!! We have developed all the content ourselves and are super stoked, after years of planning and finding the right look for our website, we are finally at the end stages of the pipeline!! We are adding a lot more content, easier browsing, lots of easy print preparation steps and TONS more information for our clients. We are providing print hints, a run down of ink variations, templates for your art and much more! We wanted to create a space for our visitors to check out our work and answer any questions they may have, without the hassle of looking anywhere else. We even made an amazing intro video as well!! 

Please check back in the coming weeks, for exclusive offers and to surf our new website!! Seriously its going to change things here in our shop immensely!!

Hubble Studio Cocktail Napkin Printing

"Hi, I have a crazy question for you". Something that we hear on a daily basis by people who call our shop wondering if we can help them out with printing with some random crazy idea that they have. Having worked in the printing field for so many years, I understand how other screen printing shops think and operate: They care nothing more than profits. They want their days to be filled with the absolutely the most productivity backed with money as possible, and the least amt of time they can spend talking to someone about a job that they would never take on, the better. (this mainly stems from them not branching out and taking on odd jobs and thus, have no ability or skillset to do such things).

At Print Renegades, we are very different. We see things differently. We have a completely different outlook on business, our clients and our workflow. First off, we love to take on odd jobs. When we have the opportunity to accept a job that we have never done before, we take it head on!! We have professionals that help us figure things out that we can call if we have questions about ink types, mesh counts or ways to do things: but more than anything, we, ourselves, have amazingly creative minds to figure things out on our own: to take a problem, then a solution and draw a line between the two.

Aside from that, taking on jobs that are difficult and require extra work might not make us the most money, but they definitely help in our ability to be better printers and this is invaluable. We have had this mindset for years and years now, and Im sure you can imagine how many crazy odd jobs that we have had to force ourselves to figure out, how much better of printers we are now, after the fact. (which is constantly ongoing).

Here is an example of a job that we had to just figure out: Hubble Studios located in Downtown LA, wanted some cocktail napkins printed for an event they were having, and they only had a few days until their event. We swooped in and helped save the day by figuring out HOW and NAILING the production of these napkins. We were able to print 12 at a time, and when printing 2500 pieces, it is indeed time consuming but also leaves a great feeling that we were able to help someone out in time for an important event they were having. (which is kind of what we live for as workers in the service industry!)