8 years of Screen Printing // Why we still do it in-house

Keeping it consistent   

It's been almost 8 years since admissionassistants first opened its doors. Over the years a lot has changed; we've worked hard on growing, giving back and working with others to share our love of what we do.

One thing hasn't changed though, we still screen print every garment in house. 

Quality control

admissionassistants is very much made by the people who love the brand, so we pride ourselves on having the highest levels of quality control. 

When we're deep in the print run and the numbers of t shirts are flying through, a particular design it may feel like one of many, but when that t shirt arrives with the person that bought it, they only have one, and that's why it's so important that every single print is perfect.

We spend a lot of time in set up before we start printing, ensuring that everything is lined up correctly, the inks are mixed perfectly and that when we press 'go', we're ready to print consistently and efficiently.

We're our own harshest critics when it comes to quality, if we don't think it's good enough, we will stop, reassess the situation and more often than not, go back to the drawing board to find a way of doing it to get the result we expect from ourselves. 

Reducing Our Carbon Footprint 

We've worked hard across the business to measure, offset and reduce our carbon footprint in order to become Climate Neutral Certified. Finding ways to reduce our impact when it comes to screen printing is difficult, but that's not a reason to not try.

We've come a long way from printing in the garage in Shaugh Prior, or even our first industrial unit in Ivybridge. We now have our own designated modern unit for screen printing, running on green energy (like all our buildings) and with LED lighting.

The equipment we use to screen print has really changed over the years, from a basic table top press in the garage and dryers that had to run continuously.. to what we have now (which is easily a whole blog on it's own!). 

In short though, with us growing as a brand and the volume of what we print increasing massively, we reached a point in late 2020 where we would either have to outsource all our printing, or move to an automated screen printing press (the ultimate upgrade in the world of screen printing!). 

To outsource would mean we would be subject to someone else's levels of quality control and that wasn't the direction we wanted to go in.

We now run a state of the art automatic screen printing machine, which brings speed and efficiency, as well as a higher level of quality across the board. We've found a huge reduction in our power usage, both from the way the equipment works, and because we're able to get a lot more done, in a much shorter time.

Our Inks

We're all about getting vibrant, long lasting prints with a great look and feel. 

We use a system that allows us to have high levels of consistency in colour, so  the same t shirt can sit side by side in the shops with no difference in print, but may have been printed at different times.

We have close to zero ink waste, use eco friendly cleaning products and have minimal water usage across the process. All our inks are phthalate and solvent free.

Organic Cotton

We are part of the production process, when we are screen printing, we are working with the fabrics. In the same way that Organic Cotton is nicer for us to print on, it's nicer for someone to cut patterns out of, it's nicer for someone to sew together. It's also way better for the planet and the people that farm it.

It's also a better fabric for the person that wears it.

We've used organic cotton for our t shirts since 2013, in fact, it's all we've ever used. 

Although we no longer screen print in the garage, our screen printing production unit is still inside Dartmoor National Park. As we make the short journey between that unit and our 00166 HQ we are forever reminded of the landscape we call home and what we're here to protect.

You can grab one of these Search and Rescue tees for yourself here.