Images Magazine Digital Edition July 2018

DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 36 images JULY 2018 Exclusive designs They’ve also recently added embroidery to their list of services, having bought a Brother embroidery machine from Hobkirk in January this year. “We do a lot of customising and we also do a lot of drop-shipping for other merch companies. It started out with merch companies who are running online stores – they’ve got artists in America and Australia and Europe who want to sell designs but they don’t really want to pay for a 200, 300-piece run and then have them warehoused. So we do a lot of drop-shipping for some quite big artists around the world and we thought, we haven’t come across anyone else offering one-off drop-shipping for things like embroidery.” As well as producing merch for music fans to buy, they also create garments for a far more exclusive set: the bands themselves. “There are big artists who have a merch licencing deal and they’re getting all their tour merch done through a certain company,” explains Tim. “For example, Stormzy last year, he obviously got his merch done through whoever their deal is with, and then we customised some merch with Adidas purely for Stormzy and the crew to wear. Especially in that urban music scene, the branding and bigging up yourself is huge, so they want to be wearing something that’s about the tour, about the artist, but they don’t want to be wearing the same as everyone else. We don’t need to be doing it on a massive scale because the whole point is that it’s not: it might be a run of 100, and it’ll be something that no one else has, or can buy or get hold of.” Live event printing It was their music industry contacts that led to them trialling in 2014 what is now a big part of their business: live printing, especially screen printing, although DTG does form part of their ‘live’ business. “It came about from a discussion with the head of production at The Secret Garden Party,” confides Tim. “We were chatting over a few beers, trying to convince him that merchandise is definitely still a good idea at these sort of festivals. He’d decided it wasn’t. He’d tried it a few times. So we challenged him: ‘We’ll run the whole thing, design the kit, inventory, everything, and we’ll prove to you it can work’.” Festival- goers screen printed their own T-shirts with Louise and Tim’s help, and it was a success, to the extent that the head of production invited them to run similar set-ups at other festivals he worked on, festivals that had either given up on merchandise or were losing money on it. Louise and Tim’s approach, on the other hand, turned a healthy profit. “The reason for buying merchandise is to carry on that emotional connection with the event – you take it home and wear it and that brings back the memories of it,” comments Tim. “Just pointing at a T-shirt on a hanger and saying, ‘That one’, that process is very quick and perhaps the joy of that is over quite quickly. You’re obviously going to The Live Ink Co HQ in Bristol Co-founder Louise Minter Tim Moore at The Live Ink Co in Bristol Shanti from the Live Print Team at Red Rooster Festival, Suffolk