Hello everyone! I am so fortunate and grateful to finally have an opportunity to transition my small clothing brand “Yarborough” into a fully functional, independent screen printing shop, but I need a bit of financial help to get the project completely off the ground. The shop will be located at 2745 Bloomington Ave, Minneapolis, MN (in the midtown area), and the lease begins on November 1st.
As many of you know, the focus of my existing brand is to use my artwork and design style to spread an inclusive, environmental, and socially conscious dialogue with clothing while donating 100% of the profits to charities and organizations who are out in the world transitioning this dialogue into action.
While I am currently employed full time at a screenprinting shop in St Paul, MN and am able to use the resources there to produce all the garments for my brand outside of the business hours, I still have to spend 40+ hours of my week screenprinting shirts for others which leaves me very little time and energy to fully give my brand and vision the focus it needs. Not to mention my current employer is so centralized on efficiency and profits that the processes and techniques used at the shop create a large amount of waste and use a lot of harmful chemicals in the cleaning processes. By having my own shop, I will be able to focus all of my time and energy into making sure all steps of the screen printing process are as environmentally conscious as possible. I will do this by:
– using water-based and discharge inks rather than plastisol
– avoiding the use of tape on screens by using permanent screen filler on the edges
– avoiding brands that package in plastic and focusing on sourcing mainly cotton clothing
– supporting wholesale brands with supply chain transparency and proudly meet ethical employment standards
Along with designing, printing, and selling my own shirts at this space to donate profits to different charities and organizations, it will also run as a business to provide custom shirts for local businesses, organizations, and individuals planning events using the same environmentally conscious process. The front display space will also potentially become a small coffee cart by my good friend Dalton Jones and we will also be able to use space for local makers and artists to sell and display their artwork.
Your contributions toward the new shop will help to pay for all the initial printing equipment and also including:
– Multi-head rotating Printing Press (for efficient, precise multi-color prints)
– Conveyor Dryer (for curing the ink on the shirts)
– Spray-Out Booth and Power washer (for washing and prepping screens)
– General Space Preparation (installing water access, building divider walls and darkroom, tables, desk, furniture, clothing racks, etc)
The shop is currently a blank open space with no water access or walls, so quite a bit of work will go into first preparing the space to print in.
As a thank you for contributing to the process of making this print shop, you will be able to receive one of the first shirts printed in the new space depending on your contribution. Any help at all will be so appreciated and I cannot thank you all enough for any love and support sent. I hope we can get this space up and running as soon as possible.
The timeline of water installation and construction on the space may cause things to not be complete and functioniong till later than December/January. I will be working on the space independently while still working full time so it may be longer than expected.