ImagesMagUK_February_2022

IS DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 30 images FEBRUARY 2022 C orey Smith-Wilkes was a schoolboy when he got into tattoos – far too young to actually get any himself. Watching reality TV show Miami Ink, he became fascinated with tattoo artwork so, as he couldn’t get inked himself, he started printing designs onto T-shirts so he could at least wear those instead. Nearly a decade later, and now aged 24, with plenty of tattoos to his name, Corey has turned his passion into a rapidly growing garment decorating business – DoomsdayCo – which boasts in-house screen printing, DTG and embroidery facilities and customers across the world. With a core workforce of 10, DoomsdayCo is now located in two units covering 5,750 square feet on Brackla Industrial Estate in Bridgend in south Wales. However, its genesis was 15 kilometres to the east, in the spare room (nicknamed ‘The Void’) of Corey’s parents’ home. Using blank T-shirts from a local business and a press at printer Merch Asylum, where he had a part-time job, he started out on his garment decoration journey. “It wasn’t really to make money at the start, it was about having the stuff I liked on clothes that I could wear, and it just went from there.” Ding, ding, ding After finishing school, Corey went travelling for 18 months, getting tattoos around the globe, but he kept the business going with UK operations run by a friend who worked as a screen printer at Merch Asylum. At this point, one of the world’s most popular YouTubers, PewDiePie, wore one of DoomsdayCo’s tops in a video after buying it through the website, and demand soared. “I was being tattooed in Australia at the time, and my phone just started going ‘ding, ding, ding’,” Corey recalls. “We were really lucky.” While travelling, Corey spotted that many tattoo studios had paintings by Pain1666, aka Diego Delfino, on display, so he got in touch with Diego to discuss a collaboration on a T-shirt with the artist’s Xerografia design. “It went absolutely crazy. Even though there are now hundreds of brands out there doing tattoo art on garments, it wasn’t such a thing when we started.” With demand growing, DoomsdayCo invested in its first equipment in 2016: a Riley Hopkins six-colour manual screen print press, with a small dryer and exposure unit, plus a single- colour Riley Hopkins press for inside neck printing. A few months later, a one-head Tajima TMBP embroidery machine was added. Two and a half years ago the company moved to its current location in Bridgend. The manual press has now been replaced by an MHM X-Type Plus eight- station, six-colour automatic screen printing press, with screen print expert (and Images columnist) Tony Palmer, of Palmprint Consultants, providing guidance and training on how to get the most out of the auto. Meanwhile, the embroidery section has grown to comprise four Tajima machines – a four-head, two TMBP single-heads and an SAI single head – plus there is a Zoje automatic sewing machine for adding tags and stitching. There are also two Brother GTX and one GTXpro DTG printers, matched with a Chiossi e Cavazzuti dryer. “Because there’s only the six-colour press, we can’t print anything over six colours so we would have to outsource,” Corey says. “But as we want to do everything in-house, you need digital to achieve the more complicated prints. With a lot of the tattoo artists we work with, if you tried to print their artwork on a screen printing machine, there’s texture and blending in the colours that you can’t achieve on a press. The DTG can print 30 T-shirts an hour while the press can print 1,000 T-shirts so it would be nice to be able to put everything on the press, but to achieve the colour quality, you just can’t do it.” Customer lifetime value Although a few independent stores place small orders for reselling, sales mainly come through DoomsdayCo’s website, where the bestselling Xerografia T-shirt retails for £24.99 and hoodies for £44.99. T-shirts are 100% cotton, usually at 190gsm or 230gsm, which Corey says is not only thicker but better for printing. Some designs can take up to an hour-and-a- half to embroider, with over 100,000 stitches. “We’re cheaper than the high- street brands that we consider as our competitors,” he adds. “Our customers understand that it’s not mass-produced. There’s more value to it.” Marketing is mostly through social media which is effective but not cheap, making it vital that customers are pleased with the quality. “Sometimes costs per purchase You need the digital to achieve the more complicated prints Printing on the MHM X-Type Plus Corey with the Tajima machines