Today we’d like to introduce you to Jesse Burkhart.
Hi Jesse, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was young and lived in a bit of a punk rock house, everyone played in bands and we had lots of parties. My roommates boyfriend was/is an incredible poster artist and printed for all the big touring bands. I just wanted to learn more about printing because it fascinated me and he would let me come down to his shop and help him. Fast forward many years later I was playing in a band that needed shirts and the drummer knew a little about diy printing and so we had a friend make us a screen from a design my tattoo artist made for us. We built a janky little wooden press and made our own shirts. The other bands in the complex saw them and wanted shirts too and we saw the opportunity. We bought a small four color one station table top press and a flash dryer and printed out of my apartment, I cringe when I think about those days, but word of mouth kept spreading and rented a shop with some friends and artist and bought bigger and better equipment. Eventually had to move to an even bigger shop with more people involved and had some really great clients, lots of bands, labels, tattoo shops, bars. Then my mom who was battling cancer was put on hospice care and it was all too much. I closed the shop and started bartending full time, it was fast paced and I could lock the door at the end of the night and not have to think about work again until my next shift, it was perfect at the time. I eventually started printing again as a side hustle and kept it that way until two years ago the opportunity to buy out a larger shop’s equiptment became available and Common Thread Printing was born.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has not been a smooth road at all haha. Owning a small business has so many challenges and I feel like there are certain mistakes you just have to make to understand how to do it correctly if that makes sense. A print shop is especially hard, there are so many areas that you have to learn and master and if you mess up one little step and you won’t get the high end result you are looking for and that is just in the production side. You still have to charm the customers and make them confident in your skills, try to figure out social media, learn how to set up and create effective paid ads. Google ads have been the best bang for my buck and have had the quickest results but they are complicated and really easy to mess up and I have wasted a lot of money on paid ad mistakes. You have to learn how to fix breakers and broken equipment, become an amature plumber, trouble shoot way outside your skill level. I had a mouse break one tiny little wire that took three days in a row of almost ten hours each day back and forth on the phone with tech support to replace $1000 cable…..That is how Winston the shop cat joined the team.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We are a custom print shop focusing on mostly screen printed high volume orders and we do it very well. We do some DTF and DTG printing as well in smaller runs but the bulk of our buisiness is made up from large order screen printing and 90 percent of that is t-shirts
What were you like growing up?
I was very very shy and scared of everything haha. I was drawn to anything creative like drawing, painting, skateboarding, music, and martial arts.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://commonthreadprinting.com
- Instagram: @commonthreadprinting
