Printwear & Promotion The Total Promotional Package
Carleigh Stillwagon trained as an elite gymnast for 14 years, but a long-term injury forced her retirement. Then COVID hit.
She recalls: “I was going crazy being at home with nothing to do. I knew I wanted to start my own business, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. My mum had an embroidery business when I was younger, so I had some knowledge of that. Then it just came into mind, let’s make shirts!”
The 21-year-old started a screen printing and embroidery business, Elite Custom Apparel with her fiancé, Carter Meade, and occasional help from her mother, Carin Spinola. She bought a heat press and set up shop in her dad’s basement. After several months, she could afford to add an embroidery machine. She made shirts and embroidered hats for friends, gaining inroads to local businesses, including EMS, police and fire departments. She also started outsourcing promotional products, like customized mugs and keychains.
“The heat press was a great way to start, but it didn’t give us good profit margins because production was slow, and it was taking us too long to get orders out,” she says.
A perfectionist by training and by nature, Carleigh demands the same level of precision in the screen printed garments produced. T shirts and sweatshirts and other garments are printed in plastisol ink on a V2000HD six-colour/ six-station manual press using a 230 mesh count for thin inks, like red, and a 110 or 155 mesh count for the underbase and viscous inks, such as white.
Rapid growth
Through social media and word of mouth, Elite Custom Apparel has grown rapidly. Four months into their screen printing venture, the couple moved from the basement to a 671sq m (2,200 sq ft) warehouse.
Today, orders range from the minimum of 24 shirts to 600 shirts. To keep up with demand, Carin lends a hand, and part-time workers are hired as needed.
“We were heat pressing a hundred shirts a week,” says Carleigh. “Now we’re screen printing a hundred shirts an hour.”
As the business continues to grow, Carleight has purchased an automatic printing press to run in conjunction with the manual press. She also wants to upgrade to a bigger drying cabinet and a 137cm (54 in.) wide conveyor dryer. Additionally, she wants to start printing with water-based inks to give shirts a softer quality and allow for more intricate design work.
“We have some big contracts in the works, and we want to make sure we’re ready for them,” she says. “My dream is to build my own shop and hopefully print thousands of shirts a day.”
“Gymnastics gave me the skills and determination to start my own business,” she says. “College would not have taught me how to do this. You just need the heart and soul to make it work.”
