What's Happened to the State of Screen Printing These Days??

This has been a thought in my head for a few years now, and upon returning from Dragon Con in Atlanta recently, it's been solidified as an unfortunate reality:

The state of quality control and craftsmanship in the business of screen printing in in the toilet.

In the images here, are a variety of tee shirts I have purchased over a couple of years. Many of them are very recent. All of them are afflicted with off-center or crooked prints. These are a variety of weights, textures, fits, brands, and so on - but they're all screwy in some way.

As a brand guy, this is extremely disappointing, not just based on the consumer experience, but as a "state of the industry" concern. It never used to be this way. Screen printers at any level and any scale used to care about (and check the quality of) the work, and now it seems that this is so grossly commoditized that we've seen it descend into total disarray, while the price for an average shirt over the course of my career has ballooned from $8 to $30.

These run a gamut. The Captain America shirt is licensed Marvel Entertainment merch from Target - and this was the second one, after the first one I exchanged was even more off-center. Then, we've got a shirt from a stage act I patronized at the convention, which loses alignment toward the bottom of the design and curves left. Next is an otherwise very nice shirt from Monday Night Brewing which is running at an angle. See also, for angles, the shirt for our kid's high school band (a graphic I was privy to before the shirt printing, and know to be off-kilter from what we approved). Lastly, and the most egregious, the shirt for the convention itself.

All of these entities deserve to have better work done by those they pay to create their merch - and for a reasonable price. But that is, alas, not the state of the business at this time.

The core issue here? We all deserve better, and should be able to depend on the craftsmanship of our vendors - and apparently we cannot, as branders, marketers, and designers. That's truly sad.

Two of the best-made (and best-printed) shirts I own are an Atlanta Falcons tee from Nike and a shirt from Mom's Spaghetti in Detroit. I love those. They're well made. But each of them was very pricey. It should not take a high price-point to ensure the quality that used to be common 20 years ago at 1/4 the price.

Us designers and marketers need suppliers to get on our level, for their own dignity and the overall health of our brands.