Images Magazine June 2018

DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 26 images JUNE 2018 Shirtworks is known in the industry as ‘the ethical printer’. Images gets the lowdown on the company’s journey from printing collegewear to becoming Soil Association- accredited, and its plans for a green future I n the mid-1980s, Andy Timmins was running a health food shop in Oxford when he and fellow trader Paul Hunter spotted a gap in the market. “People were coming in and saying: ‘I really need some T-shirts, where can I get them?’ So Andy and Paul bought a heat press, pre-cut flock letters and some transfers, and started doing small orders and retail sales. And that’s where Shirtworks started”, explains Arron Harnden, the company’s current managing director. One of their original target areas was pre-printed transfer designs of ‘80s pop bands; however, the demand wasn’t as great as the pair had hoped and so they looked around for other ways of generating income. Noticing that the tourist market in the famous university city was badly serviced at the time, they made up a few designs based on the Oxford University logo (this was in the days before it was licensed – Arron says that Shirtworks was the first company in the country to offer the two-colour collegiate style that is now a standard student item) and started selling sweatshirts from an old ice-cream bike. They quickly added a second bike and farmed out work to a printer outside Oxford, but as demand increased from Oxford University’s various colleges and the city’s shops, they decided to invest in a mini dryer and a carousel. And so began the company’s journey into mass production. As the tourist industry boomed in the late 80s and early 90s, the pair moved into a proper workshop and started employing people, all the time keeping an eye out for the next opportunity. Corporate orders along with business from the various colleges’ clubs and societies saw Shirtworks rapidly expand. “We bought a Tas auto and a couple of Hopkins carousels, real nuts and bolts kind of equipment,” says Arron, who joined the firm in 1991. Finding a USP In 1994, a move was made to a bigger unit on the outside of Oxford, on Osney Mead industrial estate. “We then went through a period of maniacal growth when we got a website built in 1993. Nobody had a website in those days, which is crazy to imagine now. We were one of the first T-shirt printing companies to have a website so from between the mid-90s through to 2000, we were at our peak growth period.” In 2000, the company moved to a new unit on the industrial estate. The challenge around this time, explains Arron, was developing a USP. “It was becoming increasingly competitive as everyone was building websites and Google was starting to rank, say, a company in Leeds, right next to us. Obviously in Oxford our rent and our rates and our wages are high, as is the cost of living here. It became easier for customers to find companies with lower costs who could therefore offer cheaper prices. “What we also recognised was that in the mind of the customer, T-shirt printing was just T-shirt printing. They didn’t appreciate that there is an art and a skill to printing, and that two different printers in two different locations can print the same job with a slightly different outcome. And so we decided to make our USP being an ethical company.” It took many months of examining processes and materials before Shirtworks gained accreditation from the Soil Association in 2004, making it one of only two companies in the UK at that time to go down that route. (Shirtworks is also accredited by the Global Organic Textile Standard [GOTS], which is aligned with the Soil Association.) “That’s been our aim ever since,” explains Arron. “We continually examine our processes and offer our customers in the UK, Europe and the US an ethical alternative. It’s not an easy road, because there can be complications and Constantly ahead of the curve [Below] David Ramonez works in digital production at Shirtworks The company is switching to all Soil Association-approved inks by 2019