Issue link: https://nbm.uberflip.com/i/1490460
4 2 G R A P H I C S P R O • F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 3 G R A P H I C S - P R O. C O M T E A M S P O R T S Our shop has really changed over the last five years in regard to uniforms. We are the official supplier for most of the local youth baseball, softball, basket- ball, and soccer teams. Five years ago, we printed all the jerseys in-house. at entails printing a one- or two-color print with the league name on the front, put- ting a number below the front print, then a sponsor name on the upper back, and a number below that. Keep in mind the baseball and softball teams have 15 uniforms per team. So, for every 15 shirts we were changing the sponsor name on the back. ese jerseys took forever to print and were very labor intensive. We would first print the front and then move them to a new machine. From there, we would print the front number below the design. On the same machine we would print the sponsor and the number on the back. We printed them this way for 25 years. Each year, we printed around 1,800 of them in that fashion. In 2019 sublimation had come a long way and became much more affordable. So, we made it a priority to start mov- ing some of these leagues to sublimation. e first year we only had one league that was willing to pony up the extra cash to order sublimation, and they were so happy with their uniforms. ey went from a boring T-shirt to a fully sublimated shirt, creating a drastic difference. The par- ents and players noticed that right away and so did the other leagues. Of course, they were still wearing a cotton T-shirt. e next year we switched over two more leagues. e last league to bite was the local soccer league. is is the biggest league we work with. ey have over 850 players, so adding $7 or $8 to the cost of each jersey is a huge invest- ment. When all the kids asked why they didn't have cool uniforms like the baseball kids, they started to consider it. We did manage to move them over to sublimation in 2022, sublimating all 1,800 of those uniforms. You may ask why this is so important. To me, it was a game changer. We do the Ty Wilson printing on the automatic screen printer. That is where we would have printed the league logo on the front. (Image courtesy Nathan Craig) for the local youth softball league. The back of this jersey features the sponsors and numbers. (Images courtesy Ty Wilson) Sublimated uniforms