What is better than a success story? A successful SEQUEL. Talk about self made men, the Brothers Palmer of T-Shirt Storm and their ‘Brand On-Demand” model have catapulted their operation to the stars. From their humble beginnings as DIY screen printers manufacturing and fulfilling their own orders for their in-house brand Redchapter Clothing to partnering with Disney and Marvel. Not too long ago we covered their story and rise to professional direct to garment printers in a fun on site interview (which you can check out just below) but they have not slowed down one bit! Join us as we take a look into a couple modern day superheroes of the print world.

If you followed part 1 of this story you already know how they got their start: bringing their high quality standard to their own clothing line resulting in the need for IN HOUSE manufacturing. The self marketed approach which landed them Disney licensing, and then evolved into their Print on Demand business that they scaled from the ground up. With Mark Palmer’s signature style of unique ambigram lettering artwork (which has been tattooed on clients WORLDWIDE) and Ryan Palmer’s technical acumen, this true family business has been poised for nothing but success. So what does two million dollars in year six of print on demand combined with a winning partnership between All American Print Supply and Epson mean for their business?

Stabilizing their fleet of printing equipment to the trustworthy Epson F2100 (x5), T-Shirt Storm has continued to prove that the sky really is the limit. With no sign of slow down in sight, the Palmer brothers have continued their expansion by acquiring not only more real estate to facilitate their growth, they have also added to (and upgraded) their printing equipment. Now commanding a line up that includes THREE Epson F3070’s their operation is firing on all cylinders more than ever. In their early days screen printing by hand, they were taken aback seeing an automated press in action. The same feeling occurred while owning their frankenstein DTG printers and seeing the Epson F2100 in action and to quote Mark Palmer (in regards to the F3070’s) “just that NEXT LEVEL OF AMAZING.”

Ryan Palmer explains “It’s not too hard to do lots of DTG printing- even with poor equipment. But as soon as you reach the need to do a few thousand shirts a week you can’t mess around and the F3070’s are what we are going to grow our company on for the next five, ten years - until Epson comes out with whatever the next generation of something might be”. In regards to sheer volume as far as a long run (of the same design), they are approaching 150 shirts an hour, making up to 900 pieces doable in a day and approximately 500 unique individual prints a day. Basing off of 2,500 prints a week, 10,000 prints a month, this is where the brothers identified where they needed to be at with their available working space. With the main bottleneck in their setup being the print speed, this was the main reason to upgrade from the F2100’s to the F3070’s.

While the delivery and installation itself was quite the process, with removing windows, hiccups in communication, etc, together T-Shirt Storm, All American Print Supply and Epson all came together resulting in what Mark Palmer calls a setup that “could not have gone better”. With their sights set on world domination and an eye to the future and a new location to house MORE printing equipment to manage their growth, we have no doubt the Palmer brothers will continue to take the print on demand world by storm.