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Outspoken consultant Charlie Taublieb helped old-school Blythe’s Athletics in Valparaiso, IN, learn some new tricks and nudge its decoration processes into the 21st century.By Theresa HegelPhotography: Rick Bella

CAN THIS SCREEN-PRINTING SHOP BE SAVED?

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COVER STORY

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bald-pated man with a neat, white goatee and a black leather jacket walks purposefully toward a nondescript storefront, dragging a rolling suitcase behind him through the start of a February snowstorm. Ignor-ing the ringing report of guns being fired from somewhere on the sec-ond floor, he enters the establishment confidently. He means business.

It sounds like the opener for a particularly grisly episode of the meth-fueled cable hit, “Breaking Bad,” with the man in question, Charlie Taublieb, a dead ringer for the steely, laconic hitman and “fixer” Mike Ehrmantraut, played by actor Jonathan Banks. But Taublieb is not in Valparaiso, IN, to take anyone out, and the only things he wants to fix are the procedures and processes at family-owned Blythe’s Athletics. The suitcase is stocked with squeegee rubber, cutters and other screen-printing supplies rather than pistols, drug money or something even more unsavory. But the gunshots? Those were real – echoing from the not-quite-soundproof walls of the indoor shooting range in the sport shop upstairs, also owned by members of the Blythe family.

Down on the first floor, however, it’s all about custom apparel. Blythe’s Athletics has been around for decades, offering a host of deco-rating services – from screen printing to chenille to spot sublimation – for both the team and retail markets. The shop has grown rapidly, jumping from 10 employees to 28 in the last five years. With nine sales-people always on the road, peddling their wares from school to school, the orders roll in, sometimes quicker than the shop’s printers can push a squeegee. It’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem, says owner Mike Blythe, a burly man with smile-crinkled eyes and reading glasses perched atop salt-and-pepper hair. “We’re a bend-over-back-ward business. … We hate to turn down an order.” But scheduling has become a nightmare, and “rush jobs totally mess us up.”

“We have great, hardworking people here. We just make mistakes too often: wrong inks, wrong temperatures, wrong mesh choices, and we have difficulty lining up work,” Blythe says. The mistakes put the shop behind schedule, and leave employees little time to learn new printing techniques and keep up-to-date with industry innovations. “We need help from the outside world,” Blythe laments. “If we could get that neutral party to set us straight and give us ideas, we could become a force to be reckoned with.”

That’s where the globe-trotting, cigar-chomping Taublieb comes in, though his penchant for eye-searingly bright button-downs cov-ered in psychedelic swirls makes it tough to imagine him as a neutral anything. A sought-after screen-printing consultant, the Denver man clocks more than 150,000 frequent flier miles a year, and is as likely to head to Pakistan as Poughkeepsie for a gig. He got his start in 1970s New York, running a contract shop that specialized in bootleg rock ’n’ roll concert tees, and his teaching style is equal parts Brooklyn bluntness and Rocky Mountain mellow. As the 68-year-old matter-of-factly tells Blythe and his employees during his two-day stint in Indiana: “This ain’t my first rodeo.”

On the morning of the first day, Taublieb settles into a small conference room to examine Blythe’s Athletics’ paperwork. Across from him, Blythe and Sharon Polite, who heads up scheduling, lean forward, elbows on the

table, awaiting Taublieb’s initial assessment. After shuffling through

the sheets, Taublieb looks up, pronouncing the paperwork good, but ultimately incomplete. He taps his finger on a sales form, noting, for instance, that there’s no place to indicate a specific ink color name or number. “You need to get clearer in that, so it doesn’t come back to haunt you,” he says.

Another issue at Blythe’s Athletics is salespeople trying to bump their orders to the front of the line, either by circumventing Polite and beg-ging favors of individual printers, or by rushing through spotty paper-work. It’s the same old story everywhere, according to Taublieb: “Every salesperson wants it yesterday. … They’re really good at sneaking things in. You can’t let them do that.” Management needs to be firm to keep production smooth, pulling orders that didn’t go through the proper channels, and insisting that forms are filled out completely. Taublieb shares a tactic that worked during his management days – anytime salespeople tried to get away with scrawling “same as before” or other incomplete information on a form, Taublieb would split their commis-sion with the secretary who had to fill out the rest of the paperwork. “They didn’t like that,” he says. But, paperwork is part of the job.

Taublieb slaps a few sample documentation forms in front of Blythe and Polite, including a print production log, a quality control log and a stopped production form. To make a reality-based schedule and stay efficient, production managers need to know how much time each step in the printing process takes, define what a passing and a failing print looks like, tabulate how many misprints occur in each run, and address any weak links in the workflow. “In order to be at the top of your game, you really need to go into detail,” Taublieb says. “It’s not to make life more difficult, it’s actually to make life easier. But there is paperwork involved.”

Blythe peruses the sheaf of papers. “Is this something we should do every day for the rest of our lives?”

“You got it,” Taublieb says. “The day you don’t ask for it is the last day you’ll ever see it. It’s human nature.”

Taublieb’s next stop of the day is the art department, where he sits down with graphic artist Melynda Tipton to help her create a template for the shop’s artwork. “As an art-ist, you’re the one who’s going to dictate placement. You’re

in charge,” he says. “If everything goes through the system correctly, the art should end up exactly where you wanted it.”

Tipton, though, is quick to point out that she’s not an artist and has no formal training; instead, the digital-age autodidact spends nights and weekends scouring YouTube when she has to pick up a new skill in the software. “I just do what my boss tells me,” she says, seeming to bristle at Taublieb’s intrusion into her domain.

Taublieb recommends that the shop alter its registration system, dropping from four to three points of registration: one at the top cen-ter, one at the bottom center and a floating bullseye to the right of the artwork. “Three points are all you need to be in registration,” he says. “Four points aren’t as good because if you took a piece of art and flopped it, the registration would still look right.”

“The printers could just read the screen,” Tipton argues. “You’re assuming that they read,” Taublieb sighs, and attempts to

explain his point further with an analogy: “Three-legged stools never wobble, but four-legged chairs do.”

Next, the duo spars over whether raster images are better than vec-tor. Tipton’s position is that vector art is simpler and all that a sporting goods shop really needs. “I want to do whatever is easiest for my print-ers,” she adds.

Raster images, Taublieb says, are more dynamic than vector art, and garments with detailed, lifelike images are more likely to catch

Consultant Charlie Taublieb helped Blythe’s Athletics improve how it burns screens by showing them how to create a chart of how long to expose a screen, based on mesh count and whether the art was printed on film or vellum. It’s also important to know which mesh count works for each printing situation. The higher the mesh count, the finer the mesh and the more strands per inch. No matter which mesh is used, though, Taublieb says, it’s important to document the type of mesh used for a job so results are repeatable and consistent.

Below are some of his recommended mesh sizes:• 86 threads per inch (TPI): athletic printing, white underlay for fleece.• 110 TPI: White underlay for fleece, high-opacity inks on dark garments.• 158 TPI: Inks on light and medium-colored T-shirts; white under-lay for simulated-process printing on dark garments.• 230 TPI: Inks on white and light-colored T-shirts and on top of white underlay for T-shirts and fleece; nylon jackets.

To make life easier, Taublieb recommends using a screen tightness of 35 Newtons per centimeter for all of these mesh counts. For more detailed information on mesh count and other free screen-printing tutorials, visit Taublieb’s website: www.taubliebconsulting.com.

Mesh Count Guidelines

“The number-one priority in a print shop is to keep the machines running. If you’re not printing, you’re wasting time. That’s the one thing you can’t do. You can’t buy back time.”Charlie Taublieb, Consultant

HOW THE WINNING SHOP WAS SELECTEDWearables asked readers with struggling screen-printing shops to submit a short video and a summary of their obstacles and challenges for a chance to spend two days with technical screen-printing consultant and industry veteran Charlie Taublieb. Taublieb reviewed the videos and other informa-tion provided by each shop, choosing the business he felt had the most potential for improvement. Blythe’s Athletics in Valpariaso, IN, won a prize package worth approximately $5,000, which included personalized on-site training with Taublieb, plus follow-up calls and correspondence. Details about Taublieb’s consulting services are available on his website at www.taubliebconsulting.com.

Employees from Blythe’s Athletics with Charlie Taublieb, from left: Connie Hogge, printer; Deb Marks, inspector; Charlie Taublieb; Mike Blythe, owner; Jessica Walker, printer; and Sharon Polite, scheduler.

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COVER STORY

the excitement of trend-seeking high schoolers. Plus, printing a sim-ulated-process color job is actually much easier than printing with vector art. “What you’re printing now, if it isn’t dead-on-the-money, you’ll ruin it,” he says. “If raster is off a little, it’s not a big deal.”

In the course of the discussion, Taublieb notices that Tipton is using a laser printer and paper vellum to output the bulk of the shop's artwork. Laser printers are great for invoices, but not so useful for outputting artwork, since they “kill some of the detail,” he says. The milky, almost opaque paper vellum is “10-year-old technology,” and makes burning screens needlessly difficult, according to Taublieb. “You’re saving a couple of cents there, and it’s costing a couple of dol-lars to do it.”

He recommends plunking down a few hundred bucks for an inkjet printer that reproduces images more faithfully and onto larger 13” by 9” sheets: “Those extra two inches don’t seem like a lot, but they’re huge.” For another $500, Blythe’s Athletics can get set up with Raster Image Processor (RIP) software, so it can create artwork with half-tone dots. Blythe, who has been hovering on the fringes, immediately whips his company credit card from his wallet and has Taublieb walk him through the necessary purchases online.

In the afternoon, taublieb ventures into a narrow, dark hallway that serves as the shop’s screen room. A shallow closet along the left wall holds an LED exposure unit, which Taublieb rewards with a thumbs-up: “Once you get an LED set up, you’re

good for the next 50,000 hours.” Outside the closet is a table for coat-ing screens, and beyond that a large screen-drying unit. The other side of the hallway holds a washout booth, where Kathy “Peewee” MacKenzie is busy spraying down an exposed screen. A tiny woman in a blue apron with gray-streaked hair secured in a scrunchie, MacKen-zie takes a break when she sees Taublieb. “I’m ready to learn whatever you want to teach me,” she says.

MacKenzie has been struggling with proper exposure time, some-times ending up with sawtooth edges or lost details in the screens she burns. To help her calculate the optimal exposure time for every situ-

ation, Taublieb has created several “test wedges,” a series of six lines printed on paper vellum, plastic vellum and film. MacKenzie exposes each line for six seconds, so that the top line gets exposed for a total of 36 seconds, the bottom for six. She does this for all the mesh counts the shop uses – 110, 158 and 230. When the test screens are washed out, MacKenzie and Taublieb check to see whether the mesh “holds the lines.” Choosing the lines that look the best on each will give MacKen-zie an exposure formula for every type of screen and film used. “It won’t give you a perfect answer, but it will get you close,” Taublieb explains.

Another tool that will help Blythe’s Athletics is a $30 hydrometer to keep track of the relative humidity in the screen room. “You’re not exactly in the driest climate here,” Taublieb notes. If the relative humidity goes above 50%, the coated screen will start pulling mois-ture from the air, and could lead to an underexposed image, he says. The solution? Pop the screens back in the drier for a few minutes to remove the unwanted moisture. “I didn’t even know you could put them back in the drier, so we’re learning,” MacKenzie marvels.

Other recommendations to make MacKenzie’s life easier and save time: a second dip tank to speed up screen reclamation, a wall-mounted screen holder that will allow her to use her scoop coater with two hands for more consistency and control, and a wide-nozzled vacuum head to suck excess water from screens after washout.

The following morning, blythe, in a sedate blue-checked short-sleeved top, greets Taublieb with a grin: “I couldn’t sleep last night. I couldn’t wait to see what shirt you were wearing.” If anything, Taublieb’s sartorial selection on

day two is louder than the last, boasting a pattern of orange and yellow diamonds on the upturned cuffs and multicolored paisley-like squiggles across the body. A fun ensemble for what Blythe dubs “the fun day,” as Taublieb sets his sights on the production department.

Production, Taublieb says, is usually the easiest area of a shop to fix. Optimizing the art and screens is always the challenge. “Once you get to production, it’s just follow through,” he adds. The first thing Taublieb does is survey the back room’s setup: A long drier runs diagonally down the middle of the open room, two manual presses populate one side of the drier, and an automatic is planted on the other. He has no complaints about the layout, but does have a sugges-tion to improve efficiency. Assign an employee to clean the ink from used screens and distribute screens and inks for upcoming jobs. That way, printers never have to leave their stations and can focus solely on production. “The number-one priority in a print shop is to keep the machines running,” he says. “If you’re not printing, you’re wasting

“I feel like we’re a 20% better printing department than we were before.”Mike Blythe, Blythe’s Athletics

Above, Charlie Taublieb prepares to burn screens for a simulated process color job at Blythe’s Athletics.

Above, Taublieb works with printers Connie Hogge (left) and Jessica Walker at one of the manual printing presses at Blythe’s Athletics. Below, he works with Kathy MacKenzie in the screen room.

Taublieb lines up a vellum depicting a ram’s head, as he prepares a simulated process color job. Below, Jessica Walker adjusts one of the shop’s manual printing presses.

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

Slideshow: Highlights From the 2016 Extreme Screen-Printing Shop MakeoverTechnical screen-printing consultant Charlie Taublieb taught the staff at Blythe’s Athletics in Valparaiso, IN, some new printing tech-niques and gave them point-ers on how to streamline their production workflow. Check out some pictorial highlights from his two-day visit: bit.ly/ShopMakeover.

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COVER STORY

time. That’s the one thing you can’t do. You can’t buy back time.” Taublieb brought several projects and supplies to teach the staff at

Blythe’s Athletics some new tricks. First up is a one-color print of an oversized lipstick kiss. Taublieb instructs printers Connie Hogge and Jessica Walker to mix some scarlet ink with a clear cherry-scented gel from DuraScent, which leaves a fragrance that lasts for as many as 20 washes. Walker pushes her squeegee, lifts the screen and sniffs the wet, red lips. Her eyes widen: “That smells good.”

Next, Taublieb lines up some rolls of metallic foil, and grabs a droop-ing plastic bag filled with bling he purchased at a bazaar in Istanbul. He shows them how to crinkle up the foil for a distressed look. “Otherwise, you’ll make yourself crazy trying to make the foil perfect,” he says. He scatters stars and studs and other metal baubles across the garment and uses a heat press to make everything stick. The sparkling, scented shirt is passed from hand to hand, and nose to nose, leaving a ripple of awe in its wake. Soon, employees line up to customize their own lip shirt. “This is the part I love, when everyone gets pumped,” Taublieb says.

Taublieb leaves a gaggle huddled around the heat press – “The mon-ster has been turned loose here” – and heads over to the automatic press to help Hogge set up a simulated-process color job: a photorealis-tic ram’s head. First, Hogge must lay down a white underbase and flash it. The rest of the colors are printed, wet on wet, from dark to light: black, red, yellow and then highlight white. “If you flash them, it’ll look terrible because they won’t blend,” Taublieb explains.

As the ram shirts topple off the belt drier, Walker and Hogge grin and gasp, delighted by the quality of their work. “It’s almost like you want to pet it, it looks so real,” Hogge says. MacKenzie, who emerged from the screen room to see the excitement, is also amazed: “We didn’t use brown ink, but it turned brown.”

Finally, Taublieb rolls up his sleeves to mix some water-based dis-charge ink. The discharging agent removes the dye in a shirt, replac-ing it with ink, and leaving a print with a super-soft hand. The plan is to screen print a stylized Viking, wet on wet, in black, yellow and an orange-tinted flesh tone. Last of all, Hogge will spread a clear adhe-

sive, so green foil highlights can be heat-pressed to the Viking’s shield and armor to give the flat vector design some life.

First, however, Taublieb pops open the canisters of discharge ink, and a pungent odor – a cross between sauerkraut and skunk – wafts through the room. “Man, that smells,” Polite says.

“That’s the smell of money,” Taublieb retorts. Success in this indus-try is all about separating yourself from the crowd, he says. “There are a lot of ways to do that, some simpler than others.” Not every shop offers things like scented T-shirts, vibrant simulated-process color or discharge prints accented with foil; those that do have an edge.

As the second day ends, Blythe is enthusiastic about his shop’s future, making plans to add practice jobs into the shop schedule, so his printers don’t forget the new techniques they’ve learned. “This really perked up their confidence,” he adds. “Sometimes, when you do something hard, it makes it easier to handle the simple things too.”

A month and a half later, taublieb checks in with Blythe’s Athletics via phone. The shop, Blythe says, is thriving. “Our day is a lot more profitable and productive because we’re getting more done,” he adds.

That starts with the art and screen departments. “We learned how to make art so that it’s easier for the printer to print,” Blythe says. Printing film, rather than paper vellum, on the new inkjet printer has made a world of difference in the crispness of the screens MacKenzie burns. Plus, with the exposure-time chart Taublieb helped her develop, there’s no confusion about how long to burn a screen. “Everything line ups so much faster and easier” when we use the films, Blythe says.

In the production room, each printer is now assigned an individual schedule for the day, avoiding the confusion of working off one mas-ter schedule. The goal is for each printer to output 10 jobs a day, as opposed to the four a printer used to average. To help reach this goal, Blythe has made a new hire, assigning someone specifically to line up jobs and clean used screens, allowing his printers to stay at their sta-tions and keep the presses spinning. Their newfound ability to print wet on wet, rather than flashing after every color, has also sped up produc-

tion. Using the technique, Hogge recently printed a 150-shirt job in one hour, instead of the three it took prior to Taublieb’s visit.

Though it’s still a “pretty hardcore athletic shop,” Blythe says, they’ve been playing with the new techniques Taublieb taught during their slow weeks. They’ve printed more shirts using scented inks and experimented with adding foil to designs. “You taught us to have a little bit of fun,” Blythe tells Taublieb. “Everything doesn’t have to be just straight-up printing. …. You don’t have to compare your pricing to everyone else if you’re not doing the same things as them.”

Taublieb is impressed with the changes Blythe’s Athletics has insti-tuted already. “You’re moving in the right direction,” he says.

“I’m excited about printing more jobs in a day,” Blythe says. “We’ve increased our business with [local sporting leagues], and I was freak-ing out a little about how many orders were coming in, but we’ve been pretty smooth. … We’re a 20% better printing department than we were before.”

THERESA HEGEL is senior editor for Wearables. Contact: thegel@ asicentral.com; follow her on Twitter at @TheresaHegel.

Discharge printing is one of the techniques consultant Charlie Taublieb showed printers at Blythe’s Athletics in Valparaiso, IN. Water-based discharge ink removes the dye from a garment, replacing it with the ink color and creating a softer print than traditional plastisol inks. Taublieb calls it a fun method that “al-lows you to do all kinds of stupid things.” Getting it right requires speed and precision, however: “You need to really work fast when it comes to water-based ink,” Taubleib says.

Below is Taublieb’s formula, based on weight, for mixing dis-charge printing ink:

Discharge base: 100%Penetrant: 5%, 10% if the print involves foil as well.Lubricant: 5%Activator: 3% to 8%; default to 6% if you’re unsure.Pigment: up to 10%, depending on desired strength.

The Formula for Success ONLINE EXCLUSIVES

Charlie Taublieb uses a heat press to add distressed purple foil to a lipstick kiss print, treated with a cherry scent. Adding bling and other novelties to a print helps to set a shop apart from its competitors, he says.

VIDEO: Day One at Blythe's AthleticsMike Blythe, owner of Blythe’s Athletics, reflects on his shop’s issues and how he hopes Charlie Taublieb will help them improve: bit.ly/BlytheDay1.

VIDEO: Day Two at Blythe's AthleticsMike Blythe and other employees at the Indiana athletic shop talk about what they’ve learned from Charlie Taublieb’s two-day visit: bit.ly/BlytheDay2.

VIDEO: Charlie's Assessment Charlie Taublieb shares his assessment of Blythe’s Athletics and gives a quick run-down of some of the techniques and tips he taught the staff there: bit.ly/TaubliebTalks.

Clockwise from bottom: Charlie Taublieb shows Mike Blythe (right) how to add foil and other bling to a shirt with a heat press. Connie Hogge, a printer at Blythe’s Athletics, shows off the cherry-scented foil T-shirt Taublieb helped her create. Taublieb bonds with Kathy MacKenzie, who handles screen prep at Blythe’s Athletics.