ImagesMagUK_February_2022

www.images-magazine.com FEBRUARY 2022 images 25 IS 3OTH ANNIVERSARY What’s the biggest challenge the industry has faced over the past three decades? Prices. For many years, we became busy fools, many of us working for not a lot of profit while our customers pushed prices further down and further down. We can all be busy fools. What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about this business over the past 30 years? Be in control of your numbers. Know how many shirts you’re printing, how much money you’re making, because, as much as many of us enjoy the craft, you need to pay the bills. Another of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a garment decorator over the last 30 years: there’s no substitute for quality. As a business, you can’t have a higher quality and then a discount quality, it just doesn’t work, so you have just high quality and then you train. Even the size we are now with 25 staff, everybody is cross-trained. Most of our staff can do three or four different jobs here, so that if anybody falls out, walks away, is ill, you can always put a substitute in; T hings, reports Graham, was Europe’s “biggest independent screen printer for many years”, employing up to 180 staff. “At the time when the first Images came out and my face appeared on the front of it with a guy called Colin Thomas, our artist, and a giant picture of Eric Clapton, we were certainly the market leaders – Golden Squeegee winners year after year. Going over to the Americans’ backyard and nicking the awards was a great joy. “For me, it started with hand-painted bags when I was working offshore and soon built up to my first screen prints, which were horrendous by today’s standards.” He kept learning and figuring out every aspect of printing, however, and moved from printing football souvenirs to music merch. In 1980, Things bought Graham’s business; he has since renamed the company Retro Activewear and is its managing director. Based in Great Yarmouth with a team of 25, he’s been a well-known face and ‘a bit of a legend’ in the industry for many years. What’s the biggest change in the industry since 1992? It’s got to be technology, computers, because they drive everything. When I first got in the industry, everything was done by hand. Separations were done by hand on overhead projectors with panchromatic films. The machines were crude; technology has driven everything. And the biggest product development? What I said just now: computers drove better machinery, far more accurate. The screen print equipment that you see nowadays, compared to the old precisions, are absolutely Rolls Royce versus farm equipment. And then, of course, digital. I wrote in 2004 that I thought digital would take over in five years. We are now in 2022, and only in the last two or three years are we starting to really see digital taking over the market. Graham Ridley of Retro Activewear was production director of Things when he graced the first-ever front cover of Images in February 1992. Here he tells us about the big moments and changes in the business of garment decoration over the past three decades and the lessons he’s learned 30 years in 5minutes training has always been massive in all my organisations. And finally, what’s your fondest memory of running successful garment decoration businesses over the past 30 years? Well, we did Live Aid. We designed the Global Jukebox [T-shirt]. We did all the production and produced a quarter of a million shirts for Live Aid, and at that time it was the first charity global event that had ever happened. It was phenomenal, it was exciting, it was challenging, and yeah – we did Live Aid! And then there’s when France won the World Cup in ‘98 against all the odds. We’d made a T-shirt design for both Brazil and France, and I can remember arguing with one of my partners who thought it was a waste of 100 shirts making one for France because Brazil were going to win it – why the hell were we giving 100 shirts away?! France won it, they all put on the shirt that we designed to pick up the World Cup, and we got a million shirts to print on the back of it. www.retroactivewear.co.uk Graham Ridley with his wife and Retro Activewear’s marketing director, Siobhan McEvoy-Ridley Scan the QR code using your smartphone to watch a video of Graham’s Q&A 1992-2022