Images Magazine Digital Edition July 2018

JULY 2018 images 35 www.images-magazine.com DECORATOR PROFILE From printing Stormzy’s gear to live screen printing at festivals, former music PRs Louise Minter and Tim Moore are enjoying every minute of running The Live Ink Co O ne of the first things we did with DTG was with One Water,” reminisces Tim Moore of The Live Ink Co. “They did an activation in Covent Garden where a member of the public [who had just bought a bottle of One Water from a nearby shop] would have a magician or a juggler go up to them and start talking. At that point someone would take a picture of their face without them knowing and by the time they’d got out through Covent Garden they were surrounded by people wearing T-shirts of their face which we’d printed in a pub basement round the corner. The impact of suddenly seeing their own face on everyone’s clothes was really cool. We had eight minutes to get all the T-shirts out.” When Live Ink’s co-founders Louise “ Minter and Tim first met, they were doing PR for bands, getting them on the radio and in magazines. They set up their own company, AMP Publicity, but after a couple of years it became clear that, after ticket sales, merchandise was the main income stream for bands. “We found ourselves in a position where it made more sense for us to start doing the merchandise for people rather than telling them about it,” explains Tim. “We went off and bought a Kippax screen printing set-up from a guy who we quickly realised was a bootlegger: it came with loads of screens that saw us printing Westlife World Tour T-shirts. We weren’t selling them, but they were interesting designs to learn from.” They started offering a screen printing service to their PR clients and the wider music industry in 2015, and grew so successful that they decided to ditch the PR side of their enterprise. They then decided to add DTG printing to their fledgling operation. “We thought, the screen printing is going really well, and we saw that the capabilities of DTG were starting to increase at quite a rapid rate. We went with Resolute purely because they were a British company. We knew we were going to go for a hands-on set- up, so we wanted a company that was on the end of the phone to help us out with anything. We’ve got two R-Jet 5s at the moment that we’re running pretty much 12 hours every day.” The pair have looked at larger production machines, but mass production is not their end goal – the service they provide is highly tailored to each individual company. Live Ink ran a live printing event at the Rough Trade record store for the Bestival festival’s 15 Hours in Bristol event in May