The Print Industry Is a Sports League (And Your Shop Is the Team)

When we first started building Halo, we made one decision that ended up shaping everything. We didn't want to look or present like everybody else.

Look around the industry and most print shops run the same nerdy CMYK graphics and the same cheesy names. We come from a branding and marketing background, so that always bugged me. We had a decent amount of experience in advertising and in actually trying to resonate and connect with people, and that stuff matters way more than printers give it credit for. There's also a very practical reason it bugged me. The moment you look like everybody else, people start comparing your prices to the shop down the road. That's the game you never want to be in, because the only way to win it is to be the cheapest, and being the cheapest is just a slow way to go broke.

So instead of blending in, we paid close attention to the shops we actually looked up to. The ones flying in their own lane. And studying them is what made the whole thing click for me. The print industry is a sports league, and every shop is a team. Once you see it that way, everything you thought you knew about competition stops making sense.

Everybody's got their own lane

Look at the shops doing it well and you'll notice none of them look the same, because they're all playing to a different crowd.

The way I see it, Fresh is all about dark colours, graffiti, hip hop, vinyl, that heavy raw style that speaks straight to streetwear and the people who live in it. Aisle6ix leans heavy metal, zombies, bright colours, a whole world of hand printing and posters. Sweeney Bros has that laid-back surfer thing going, which fits them perfectly being out near Bondi. And further afield you've got legends like Dr Moose doing their own thing too.

None of them look like a generic print shop. They each have a feeling. And once I clocked that, the competition thing stopped making sense to me. We don't have to look at each other as enemies, because we're all pulling different audiences and marketing to different people. The surf guy isn't going to walk into the clean-cut design studio. The hip hop kid isn't booking the heavy metal shop. Everybody just gravitates to the team whose jersey they like the most.

This is the bit most printers miss. People already know about the other shops. They know we exist, they know what we do. But because they don't vibe with that particular culture, the cultures don't really clash. It's the same way the hardcore kids back Make Merch and all the work that comes out of Imprint Merch. Different scene, different team, same loyalty. Everyone just has their favourite printer, and we all honour that, at least here in Sydney. Same way you'd honour someone backing a different sports team.

So how do you find your lane

We looked at the whole field and went hunting for the gap nobody was sitting in. Everybody was being cool, or edgy, or super precise. Almost nobody was being warm. So we picked the soft, bright, almost childlike branding and carved our own lane as the world's friendliest print shop. Pink team colours. One same-day custom printed tee as our whole thing. We didn't try to out-cool the cool shops. We built a completely different stadium.

If you're trying to find your own lane, start with who you're genuinely for, and be just as honest about who you're not for. A lane isn't a logo. It's the music you'd play in the shop, the kind of work you get hyped to post, the customer you could happily talk to for an hour, and the customer you'd honestly rather send somewhere else. Most printers are scared to narrow it down because it feels like turning away money. It's the opposite. The clearer your lane, the more obvious you become to the exact people who were always going to love you, and the less you have to shout to reach them.

The two fears that kept us sharp were these. We didn't want to be lumped in with the cheesy printers, and we didn't want to get looked over because we looked like everybody else. So we picked warmth as the whole identity, then backed it up so hard and so consistently that nobody could confuse us with anyone else. Find the one thing you can own better than the shop next door, and own it loud.

Your fans want to wear the jersey

Once you start treating yourself like a team, your customers stop being customers. They turn into fans. And fans do something customers never do. They wear the jersey.

One of our core values from day one has been to always hook people up. Free shit, constantly, for years. After about five years of giving stuff away, our merch quietly turned into a kind of you-know-who club. If you've got Halo gear on, it means you're tapped into the Sydney scene, the local shows, the artists and musicians we print for. People started seeing it as an achievement to get their own merch done through us, purely from seeing our logo on the heads of people they respect.

The part that took me a minute to understand is the paradox in that. We give the stuff away for free, and giving it away for free is exactly what made people want to earn it. Free didn't make it cheap. It made it mean something. When you hand a hat to the right person and they wear it with pride, everyone else who sees it wants in, not because it's expensive, but because it obviously means you belong to something. You can't fake this either. People smell a marketing stunt from a mile off. It only works when you're actually gifting from a real place, because you genuinely like looking after people.

And honestly, the gifting was never some strategy we drew up on a whiteboard. It's just who we are. We like giving people free shit. We like the look on someone's face when you hand them a tee they weren't expecting. The marketing was a side effect of being generous for long enough that it became our reputation. That's the part you can't shortcut. You can't gift for three months and expect a movement. We did it for years before it turned into anything, and we'd have kept doing it even if it never did.

The clearest example I've got is from the Sydney Tattoo Convention. I gifted a cap to Eddy Deutsche, a legend tattoo artist, a Halo piece we'd made as a collab with Rose Winter. Eddy wore it around the entire convention. Next thing you know, people are walking up to our booth asking if we've got any more of "the Eddy Deutsche hats." They went super fast. And then I'm watching people spot each other in the hats out on the floor and on the street, pointing and high-fiving like they'd found their own.

That's the whole thing in one moment. The second someone puts that cap on, they're basically wearing a Yankees hat. Everyone around them instantly knows which team they ride for. Except the team is a print shop. Once you treat yourself like a team, the merch creates itself, and the fans ride for you and evangelise without you ever asking.

The Yankees don't card their fans

This is where I go against most of the marketing advice out there.

The Yankees don't discriminate on who their fans are or what they look like. But a lot of print shops do exactly that. They only want to associate with people who look like them, or like the narrow niche they're marketing to. And they do themselves a massive injustice, because the pool of people you exclude with that branding is way bigger than the little niche you're chasing.

So we went the other way and made the team as open as we could. Everybody's welcome. Everybody gets a hat, everybody gets merch, everybody gets to be on the team. If someone can't afford it, we'll hook them up. If someone's a starving artist, we'll hook them up. And those people don't just vanish. They turn into advocates. They become the person telling everyone else to watch the game, to buy tickets to the events, to share the highlights and the results. Being the open, friendly team is exactly how we rose above the noise. That, and the fact that our work is solid. You need both. Friendly with bad work is just a nice guy who can't print.

Being inclusive doesn't mean being lazy with your brand though. The team still needs colours people are proud to wear. So look hard at your logo and ask whether a fan would actually rep it. Is it a 1990s Raptors logo, which is insane and amazing and people still wear thirty years later? Or is it a boring Epson logo that nobody is ever going to put on a hat, because there's no community baked into it?

Your logo is the jersey, and that's the real test. Would a stranger wear it walking down the street with no connection to you, just because it looks good and feels like it belongs to something? If the answer is no, you don't have a brand yet, you've got a stamp. This is a big reason screen printing has always had a stronger community than digital, too. A lot of the digital side just doesn't have the same artistic value and care that screen printers put into their work, and people can feel that.

Float people credit and watch what happens

The best proof I've got that any of this works is my friend Chase, who runs a brand called Death Division.

When Chase first came to us, he didn't have the cash up front to print at the scale he wanted. So we floated him credit. We'd print his shirts, he'd sell them, then he'd pay off the credit. That was it. It let him get a lot more ideas out the door and a lot more traffic back into his brand. And because we looked after him when it counted, he became one of our biggest advocates. He got a lot of his friends to appreciate and love the shop too. Chase is loved in the community and well known enough that when he tells people to come to Halo, they take it seriously. A huge part of the splash we've made in Sydney traces straight back to Chase and people like him. Five years on, we've both grown into bigger, better brands.

That's what I mean when I say invest in your players. It isn't charity. It's backing someone before there's any proof, taking on a bit of the risk yourself, and watching it pay off for both of you over years. There's a line I keep coming back to. When you love with an open hand, people are free to flutter out and fly back in. You're not gripping, not forcing anything, you're just leading from a place of security and trusting that what's meant to come back will come back. And it does. The shops that operate from insecurity, the ones that need to control and squeeze every single interaction, are the ones that end up secluded.

It's a friendly game, but it's still a game

Don't get me wrong, none of this means going soft. I want to train my hardest and be the best. I want our work to speak for itself, so on any given day I could go up against anyone, anywhere, and hold my own. That fire is real and it matters. But the difference is this. In a classic team sport like basketball, nobody's trying to kill the other team. You're not out to injure them or end them. You play as hard as you can to win, and then you shake hands after. We try our absolute hardest to stand out and squash the competition in the friendliest way possible, and we never cross the line into actually harming another shop.

A lot of that friendly energy in Sydney got kicked off by people like Junior at Fresh, who's always been a genuine stand-up guy and not a competitive vulture. That kind of tone spreads. It gives everyone permission to play the game with respect.

And yeah, the ugly version of this industry absolutely exists, all over the world. Printers who dig for intel, who cold-call to poach each other's clients, who try to poach staff, who talk nasty about other shops to win a job. That's not competing. That's just being a bad teammate to the whole sport. In the league we're building, we honour the fact that we're all in this together.

The wildest part, and the bit that actually proves the whole thing, is that we send work to our so-called competitors all the time. Sweatshop, Fresh, ASYD. And they send work back to us. It works because we're all in our own lanes. Halo's colours are pink and our thing is one same-day printed tee. So when someone wants one same-day custom tee, they head our way, and when they want something that's really another team's specialty, I'd genuinely rather point them to the shop whose jersey fits the job. That customer leaves happy, and that shop remembers it. Every time you make that call from security instead of fear, the energy of your town lifts a little, then your state, then your whole country starts to change, because you're leading from a place of what will happen will happen instead of needing to force everything.

PRINTOOLS is the league

For a long time this was just how I ran one shop. Then it hit me that the same logic scales to the whole industry, and that nobody had built the thing that actually holds it all together. So that's what PRINTOOLS is.

If every shop is a team, PRINTOOLS is the league. Think of it like the NBA. It's the place where the teams congregate, talk, buy, sell, learn, and meet up through the events we're putting on. And like any real league, part of the job is integrity. We're not going to hand an account to a shop with genuinely unethical practices, or to people who are known to operate badly, because a league is only as good as the standard it holds.

The reason that matters is pretty simple. Right now most printers solve everything alone. You hit a wall with a fabric, a press, a customer, a supplier, and there's nobody to call who isn't also trying to beat you. A league fixes that. When the teams actually congregate and talk, you stop reinventing the same wheel in twenty different sheds around the country. You share what works, you flag what doesn't, and the whole standard of the sport goes up. For a small shop, that's worth more than any single machine on the floor.

That's the bigger goal. Over time, PRINTOOLS is meant to give this industry a backbone it's never really had. The plan is to grow into the body that helps define what real industry standards mean for garment printing in Australia and around the world, and to give printers a voice on the stuff that's always been handled alone and behind closed doors, the insurance, the regulations, the governance, all of it. None of that exists for us right now, and it should.

There's a layer most people never even think about. Even the gear is a league of teams. Ryonet, M&R, ROQ, Brother. Look closely and you can see exactly who each one is talking to. One leans blue collar, one leans techy, one leans a bit more rock and roll. They've each got their own fans who swear by them. The NBA has Spalding and Nike. We've got our own equipment brands that printers rep with the same loyalty, and knowing which gear you fly the flag for is part of finding your place in the league too.

Print Island

If PRINTOOLS is the league, then the championship is Print Island.

The goal down the track is a big two or three day convention, but not the dry trade-show kind. Live music. Food. Booths where shops set up to represent themselves, sell their merch, meet their people, and just have a genuinely good time. The teams and the fans all in one place. I want Print Island to be the number one destination for printers in the world, right up there with FESPA, except built around something different. FESPA is the machinery and the technology and the trade. Print Island is the culture.

That's the piece that's missing, and the tattoo world already figured it out. Every tattoo shop is its own team. They've got their own conventions, their own legends, their own crowds. Nobody walks into a tattoo convention asking for the cheapest artist. They go to see the work, follow the artists they love, make friends, find new clients, and wear the fact that they got tattooed at a certain shop like a badge of honour. There's live music, there's food, and the craft sells itself because the culture around it is loud and proud. We want to bring that energy, that skate culture, that tattoo culture, that sports culture, into the beautiful world of garment printing. Because honestly, we're probably the most artistically inclined corner of the entire printing world. Garment printing genuinely shines when it comes to creativity. It deserves a culture that matches.

The way I see it, we've already got every ingredient a real culture needs. The artists, the characters, the rivalries, the die-hard fans. We've just never thrown ourselves the party. Print Island is the party.

Why I actually want this

I'll be straight with you about the real reason behind all of it. I'm a people person. Given the choice, I'd rather spend my time with the people of this industry than spend it chasing one more customer order. We got good at the customer side fast, faster than I expected. And when I look around now, a lot of my fellow teams are struggling to make shots I've already figured out.

So I asked myself a simple question. If I'm genuinely good at shooting three pointers, why would I sit in my own corner playing a lonely game against people who are still learning to shoot? Why not chill out, stop competing with them, and just teach everyone how to shoot, so I can be coach of the year instead of the guy who scored the most points in an empty gym? I don't mean that with any ego. I mean it as humbly as I possibly can. I just don't want to do this alone, and right now the industry feels really divided. It doesn't have to be.

So if you're a printer reading this, stuck in the grind, cutting your prices to the bone, treating everyone in town like a threat, this is the shift I'd ask you to make. Make more friends than enemies, every single day. Find your lane and own it so hard that nobody can compare you to anyone else. Hook people up. Send work to the team that fits the job. Wear your colours with pride and let other shops wear theirs.

Because I've watched the other path play out too many times. You seclude yourself, so the other shops stop liking you. They stop liking you, so they stop recommending you. The clients catch on, the recommendations dry up, you turn sour, and one day you wake up as the age-old grumpy printer everybody tries to avoid. I don't want that for you, and I really don't want it for this industry.

If you want one move for this week, try this. Reach out to one shop you've always quietly seen as the competition, and find a single way to be useful to them. Refer them a job that isn't your lane. Tell them something you learned the hard way. Show up like a teammate before you ever need anything back.

You were never meant to play this game alone. There's a league forming. Come get on a team.