ImagesMagUK_Digital_Edition_Feb18

www.images-magazine.com FEBRUARY 2018 images 27 DECORATOR PROFILE This is where things started to get a bit messy One of the own-brand T-shirts from Unbroken Clothing Colour separation is a big passion of Alex's nothing. Another building was offered by the landlord, they moved in, spent £10,000 sorting the electrics and getting it ready. They opened, people started coming through the door, the digital equipment started paying for itself – and then the scaffolding went up as problems were found with this building as well. Back to the manual After six months, and with no roof on the building, Alex went back to the landlord and said he was about to go bankrupt. The landlord offered to release him from the lease, but also offered him a smaller shop nearby. Alex took it and sold the automatic press and the dryer – all the equipment that made the money, he explains, because the digital equipment was all on lease. "There was no way out of it," he says. "I had to bite the bullet and say, 'We're going to have to go back to printing by hand.'" People had suggested he go bankrupt, but that wasn't an option for him. "I'm a big believer in doing things with integrity. I'd rather sell as much as I can, pay off as much as I can and make sure I'm able to make my repayments on everything else. I sold the stuff to a company called JSA Print, a bunch of good guys up in Manchester. I took it up, installed it for them, spent the weekend there teaching them how to use it. It was a sad day, obviously, for me." He still had a small M&R Sidewinder that he'd had as back-up for the auto, and it's on this that he's printing T-shirts at the moment, starting at 7am every morning. "We moved into this little shop, did a bit of refurbishing and went back to printing by hand. It's tough going, because we still have the same customer base but we're trying to get the work out by hand... I'm sore every night when I go home." He's now split the company into two. Unbroken Print offers digital services only and is run by his brother-in-law, who owns an equal share of the business with Alex. The screen printing side he's called Supreme Screen, which he and his sister work on, with the plan that Supreme Screen will eventually move to its own unit on an industrial estate out of town, and replace the sold automatic and big dryer. "Because that's the part that I'm really passionate about, I don't love the digital side. I'm a big believer in loving what you do. I'd rather be skint and love what I do, than rich and hate what I do." Separating the two businesses has been "a bit of a ball-ache", he admits, as it's twice the work, but it's the right move. His brother-in-law is quickly learning to do the accounts and deal with the business side of Unbroken Print, and Alex says they've been busier in the past two months than they have been in the past two years. As he talks about colour separation, Alex's passion is immediately evident. "It has always been quite a challenge, especially with lots of multicolour images, to bring it down to six colour. But I love the colour separation – I know a lot of guys just farm it out, but for me that's a huge part of the fun of it." His main clients are independent clothing brands, drawn to him thanks to his colour separation expertise, which ensures prints are spot on each time. He has his own women's clothing line, Unbroken Clothing, so he understands the need for high quality when printing for retail. Retail perfection It's this drive for retail perfection that has led to him using Wilfex ink from Colenso Screen Services. "It's great, it prints really easily, you don't get any build-up on the bottom of your screen and the Pantone matching is bang on every time." The smaller runs that come with printing for independent brands is also manageable with a manual, plus it fits in with Alex's philosophy. "Although it'd be great to be popping out five or ten thousand shirts a day, at the same time I don't want to have people work for me slogging their guts out for very little. I want people to be rewarded well for being loyal and working for me." He continues: "And for me, as long as I can put food on the table for my kids and take the wife out for a meal every now and again it's good enough. I've got no ambitions to be a millionaire, or take on the world – I just want to bring my kids up, and I want people who work for me and around me to enjoy the fruits of their hard work." www.supremescreen.co.uk