Ok… I’ll admit it… I’ve been stalking someone. No! No! It’s not what you think! I’ve been stalking Skreened on Twitter. I look at a LOT of POD companies… there’s more of them out there than you think. Quite frankly, a lot of them leave something to be desired and I take a quick looky-loo and mosey on off. Something about Skreened intrigued me though, so I decided to lurk in the background and furtively watch them. *insert James Bond music here*

I’m pleased enough with them that I’m currently working on my own shops there AND they get their own Skreened forum here! 

Imagine my delight when one of my valiant mods mentioned that he was going to interview them for his site and would write up something for POD For You as well! Brian visited Skreened yesterday and sat down with the owner, Daniel. You can see Brian’s two part story, complete with pictures, at Selling Out on Digital Gryphon. Part one is already up and part two shall be coming tomorrow. As a complement to his story, Brian provided the following Q&A to us. Enjoy!

Brian: Who came up with the idea of Skreened? When? And is what you have now what that first idea was or has it changed?
Daniel: It was me, I came up with the idea. Now to say that I came up with the idea is a misnomer because I was definitely aware of CafePress and Zazzle at the time, so in a sense we are standing on the shoulders of great companies.

Brian: No idea is totally..
Daniel:Yes- it didn’t happen in a vacuum. I was working as a designer for Nationwide Insurance at the time- and I wanted to start a T-shirt site. And so I could either design all the t-shirts or I could help people design them and print them and have a whole community based around it. That sounded a whole lot more appealing; a community of designers – not me to just try to crank out five good designs a week (I’m not that great of a designer). So the business model had been kind of pioneered by these other companies and then we got into really sourcing it. It didn’t start being an Ethical company so in a way what’s changed is that.

I started off wanting to be kind of ‘The Hipster Designer’ niche. To some degree I think some people would call it that, and to some degree it’s more general, I think it’s a little broader appeal than that. But definitely holding strong to not exploiting people anywhere along the supply chain; something we hold really dear.

Brian: Did you specifically change to become ethical or did you just put a name on what you’d always been?
Daniel:In the process of sourcing and discovering some of the things out there, and some of the practices, we made certain decisions that put us squarely in what we could call ‘ethical’.

Brian: So it wasn’t a business decision that said “let’s be ethical” – it was that when presented with the evidence you made the obvious choice.
Daniel:Yes- and the same thing with being ‘green’ – it was like the whole kind of trend in Marketing happened and we took a step back and said “are we doing all this stuff, kind of already?” and we’re like “ya we’re doing a lot of it. Is there some more stuff we could do? Ya- let’s put it on our ToDo List and we’ll just keep moving in that direction” And one of those things was the packaging which is great.

Brian: How is Skreened different from:
a traditional screen printer,
from the walk-in t-shirt shops (’head shops’),
other web-based POD sites?
Daniel:it is different from a Screen-Printer in that we do ‘on demand’ (obviously) and the technology makes that different- we use ‘direct to garment’. That gets into the difference from head shops and the iron-on places in that it’s a huge quality jump up when we’re dealing ‘direct to garment’ digital print from something that gets ironed on.
And then ‘how are we different on the web-side?’ – which is really where the story is for us. In that we are 100% ethically made in the United States under supervisory labour laws and good things like that. So we’re really pushing being an ethical company; being responsible as far as where we’re sourcing our garments from.

Brian: You mentioned before we started; the store front is fairly new.
Daniel: We started in Sept 2006; production facility was basically just me in a room with a printer. We’ve actually grown, had a lot of growth, in the last 6 to 8 months; since we opened up the retail store. So we’ve got our Production Facility and our Retail Store sharing the same space. And anybody can come in with a Zip drive or whatever and get whatever they want. They can also order off the web-site. So if somebody in Arkansas uploads to Skreened anybody in Columbus can come in, search that design, and buy it. So we’ve got a secondary, retail, outlet for their designs.

Brian:On your website you mention that you also offer traditional screen-printing for a minimum 25 pieces- where is that done?
Daniel:We have another facility we share for that.

Brian:Roughly how many shops, designers or designs are available?
Daniel: Since they’re dynamic numbers just go to the site. Just do a search and don’t type anything in, hit “Search” .. I know we’ve got about 12,000 different designs up. What some other places do is multiply that by the number of products you can get it on and you come up with millions; so our mulitplier is somewhere around 800,000.

(I did check the site; 2,786 stores with 12,637 unique designs)

Brian: From the website it looks like you can print pretty much the entire front of a shirt.

Daniel: Yes- that translates to 11 x 17. This is one of the things I want to feel more comfortable about; that preview would be analogous to a Men’s Small. So if someone were to get that on a 2x or 3x it would not look the same.

Brian:I see you can print on the backs; is that for everything, and is it the same print area?
Daniel: Yes and yes.

Brian:You have some bright colors; are you planning on offering Dark Colours; printing on a white underlay?
Daniel: We have the technology to do that; it looks bad and it costs a lot. I’ve played with it (done it as a special) but I don’t think people will be happy with the quality.

Brian:If someone has a file that is significantly smaller- not wanting it bigger, but say the print area is 10×12, does your uploader allow the artist to position it?
Daniel: Yes you can scale it regardless of resolution (at this point) and place it wherever you want; it’s a complete drag & drop- drag & scale operation.

Brian:Are you looking at adding either more apparel or anything non-apparel beyond the totes? Say- anytime later this year.
Daniel: Yes.

Brian:And that’s all you’re going to say? [laughter]
Daniel: We’ve got one thing coming out that we may brand under a different name; way may launch a separate brand ‘Powered by Skreened’. We’ve done some prototyping, If you sniff around Twitter you may- well enough about that.

Brian: Do you offer, for anyone who sets up a shop, any customization of the layout?
Daniel: When we re-launched our site the other week, one of the things we did was get everything in line css-wise so that all of those things can be toyed with- customized. I think it’s even to the point of where we have a tab that says ‘customize your shop’s css’ ready to be enabled.

Brian:Later this year?
Daniel: Absolutely- it’s going to be tested and verified in the coming weeks.

Brian:What’s your policy on ‘mature content’? Anything from gross humour to a leather pride flag… where’s the limit?
Daniel: Hate speech. It’s at our discretion; after years of doing this I don’t believe we’ve had anything that’s really crossed the line. I’ve found a couple of things that tempted me, and I’ve erred on the side of letting them stay up. Anything that is considered Hate Speech is not appropriate for this site.

Brian:Other than that…
Daniel: Other than that… it’s not a public forum, it’s not ‘free speech’. It is paid speech so we have the right to take down anything, but we’re pretty loose with what’s appropriate. We get far more things that are just ‘bad’ than ‘morally bad’. Oh- pornographic stuff. I don’t think that (genitalia) would be appropriate in explicit illustration or photographic nature.

Brian:Given this opportunity to speak to designers actively involved with PODs elsewhere, what can you say to interest them in looking at you as another source?
Daniel: In one sense it’s more of an argument of ‘why not?’ Here’s another sales outlet that costs nothing…it’s going to take a certain amount of time to set up. So it’s that; is it worth investing my time to upload my files, describe and tag them?

Brian:There are companies around the world agressively pursuing people. Some of them are companies that I flatly refuse to give any time to; for a variety of reasons. Some of them coming back to your Ethics argument, others to quality. But there are still a dozen companies that I or any designer could use for their next shop- so back to the question: why Skreened?
Daniel: This may be tipping my lack of ‘business acumen’, but I don’t think we’re for everybody. I think we’re for people that care about Human Rights. I think there’s, you know a lot of people want the cheapest thing and they want to get it out there and make a buck. They don’t care what happens along the supply chain. We’re not that company.

“We’re a company for people who create original things; if people are reading this and they want to rip off.. the underbelly of POD , people that are just ripping stuff off the web; No Thanks! That’s not a good faith use of our site. We produce a high quality image; we use high quality garments, we verify where stuff comes from. We care about what we’re doing.

“An example, someone (not a customer or shopkeeper) emailed me a long, long email. I get back to her with a long, long email within the hour. I own the company. Michelle would have done the same (Michelle is in charge of Customer Service). Joe prints, Sharon ships, Michelle prints; you can get ahold of us.

Brian:Who is Michael?
Daniel: Mike is our web developer. You can tell us what you like, what you don’t like- and we change it. We’ve got this system in place; it works fairly well. There are some bugs; tell us about a bug and we fix it. It’s people- you know who you are dealing with.

Brian:I can’t say how many readers will suddenly decide to visit Skreened.com and sign up for a shop- but is your new site ready for it?
Daniel: Yes. Our new site is ready and able to handle hundreds more designers.”

Brian Gryphon has been producing photographic images for over 30 years. He operates a number of POD shops that offer his floral photography on apparel, prints and other merchandise.  He brings experience in commercial and retail sales, marketing, management, and commercial art + design; as well as college training in business techniques, programming and applied arts.  Brian is also a published author, poet and photographer. He started playing with computers by programming basic for an IBM-XT and continues to design and operate a number of web-sites; business and personal. He can be found Twittering as well as on-line on various forums and Instant Message services. Or else he may be at the world-famous Whetstone Park of Roses or the local ‘no-kill’ rescue shelter.

Brian Gryphon can be found at  digitalgryphon.com or digitalgryphon.net .

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