My weekend deserves its own blog entry.

Wow. That’s all I have to say about this weekend. Not necessarily “wow” in a good way… just… wow.

Let me start from the beginning. N decided a couple months ago that he wanted to start a T-shirt screen printing business. I volunteered to be his investor and partner in exchange for 50% of the new business. He is the salesperson and general “plant manager”, and I handle vendor relations, accounting, and marketing.

Well, being the excellent salesperson that he is, N went out a few weeks ago and got our first order: an order for a fraternity that he belonged to while he was in college. The shirts were due yesterday (Sunday) night for rush today.

As soon as he signed the order, I started ordering parts. I found a “COMPLETE T-SHIRT BUSINESS!!!!1111” on eBay for $2495.95. After corresponding with the seller, Steve, who promised me that this was the be-all, end-all of T-shirt business kits (including the press, dryer, and everything else we would need), I purchased it.

I paid with a check drawn off one of my credit card accounts since they were offering a low interest rate for purchases if you used the checks. Unfortunately, Steve, having been burned in the past with checks, needed to hold it for 10 days to make sure it cleared. I understood the policy, but also understood that we definitely weren’t going to get the machines in time with 10 days for the check to clear plus 7 days for ground shipping from the east coast to California. I asked Steve for another option, and finally he decided to charge another credit card of mine and reverse the charge after the check cleared. After doing that, he shipped the equipment, along with an instruction manual on how to use it.

The equipment was shipped UPS and arrived in Simpli’s office (where we had decided to set it up) on Thursday. N went to work setting up the equipment. We quickly noticed that the instruction manual and video was missing. I placed a call to Steve, who said it had been shipped separately via USPS. Thursday and Friday passed, and we had everything (including our T-shirts, which I had ordered from another vendor) except that darn instruction manual.

Saturday morning, we realized we had a problem. We had several machines and absolutely no idea how to use them. Since neither N nor I had ever even seen T-shirts printed, we were flying completely blind.

The how-tos on the Internet were maddeningly sparse. (Business idea: Someone needs to make a downloadable/purchasable e-book or video that shows this sort of stuff for a nominal fee.) Most had text or pictures (not both), or showed a slightly different way of doing things.

We spent most of Saturday trying to get the emulsion on the screen (which is the first step in the T-shirt printing business.) After quickly going through 2 screens and an entire bottle of emulsion, we found another how-to and realized we were doing it completely wrong. Not only that, but we’d just used all of the emulsion we had.

It was Saturday at 5:50PM when we realized this. We knew we had to find a local store that sold photo emulsion. After digging around on the Internet, I found that Utrecht, a local art supply store, had it. I called their Berkeley store. They had 3 emulsion kits in stock, and they were still open. The problem? It was 6PM, they closed at 7, and they were an hour north of San Jose.

We raced out of the office, jumped into the car, and motored it to Berkeley. The clock hit 7PM just as I was crossing the Oakland/Berkeley border on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. We called the store again and begged for mercy. Finally, at 7:05, we arrived. They unlocked the door for us and were good sports about the whole thing. We bought two emulsion kits ($40) and jumped back in the car.

I knew then it was going to be a late night, but we still needed more supplies, so we stopped at Lowe’s in Fremont on the way home. We bought a few more supplies and headed back to start what was going to be a very long night.

We got the emulsion on correctly and got the screens “burned” on Saturday night. We made so many more mistakes that I’m not even going to go into details here, but at 2AM, we had finally gotten to the last stage in T-shirt printing — squeegeeing the ink onto the shirt. (Thank God our client only wanted a single color, as all the colors must be done separately.) Of course, the ink did not go onto the shirt properly, so we called it a night and went home.

This morning, we grabbled lunch and got into the office around noon. Both of us were grumpy and tired. We scrapped everything we had done Saturday night, cleaned the screens, and started over. We got the emulsion on correctly (after starting into our third and final bottle of emulsion), and several hours later, were ready to print again. During that time, we figured out what we had done wrong previously on the printing stage, and at about 10PM, we finally printed our first shirt.

I remember that moment well — we pulled the press up, and there was a perfect T-shirt print. We stared at it unbelievingly for a few minutes. We then realized we had actually printed a T-shirt, and celebrated with loud shouts and cheers.

After that, it was just manual labor… we printed the front of the 70 shirts the fraternity had ordered, then dried them, then printed the back and dried that. It was 4AM when we finally had folded all the T-shirts and stuck them into a box to be delivered to the frat. (We’d called them and asked for an extension to this morning.) We went to bed exhausted but proud. We’d completed our order!

We made about $300 on the sale after accounting for the T-shirt cost. Of course, we are still out some $2700 or so on supplies. But now that we know how to do the T-shirts properly, it should go a lot faster. Steve told us that a run of 70 T-shirts shouldn’t take longer than a couple hours to go through once we knew what we were doing. For 2-3 hours of work, a $300 profit wouldn’t be bad at all (and will make this company a great weekend/side project!)

All told, we spent 30 hours this weekend bumping into walls and “flying blind” until all of the T-shirts were successfully printed. It is indeed a miracle that we pulled the whole thing off by piecing together how-tos on the Internet. This is one of the most satisfying checks I will ever receive.

UPDATE: Brandon just told me that the instruction manual and video finally arrived. Doh!