Today we’d like to introduce you to Ray West.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I studied print-making and design in college. During my senior year, I worked as an artist at a screen print shop in Athens, OH. My ambition as a young person was to be a graphic designer and work for a big company. I think I somehow thought that would be stability. Yikes!
I worked as a designer and advertising manager for a grocery wholesaler. Left to do creative services management for a design firm. Left that to do financial sales first for a big investment company, then for a bank. Then came back to the grocery business to manage designers in an in-house creative dept. All along the way I kept getting more and more miserable and very much not in love with the idea of work.
I knew I had to do something on my own, something creative in nature, without a boss, and most importantly, I wanted to do something that I could get better at the longer I did it. But I had no idea what that could be.
At that time, I started making t-shirts with freezer paper stencils. One-off pieces as birthday gifts for friends of my kids. Things like a robot fighting a shark. Silly things that I’d spend way too much time on. A few people would ask if we had a printing business, but I’d be like, oh no, that’s just something I do for fun. Here I am fruitlessly searching for a creative way to make a living, but I wasn’t seeing what was right in front of me!
An artist friend told me I should consider selling shirts, but I still didn’t think that was a great idea. I said, those take forever to make, I’d have to charge a fortune for each one. His response was, you’d be surprised what people are willing to spend money on.
Finally it clicked and I really started looking closely at t-shirt printing on a larger scale. My knowledge from art school and working at the screen shop was very out of date but I started from scratch with a modest manual shirt press and a willingness to watch a lot of youtube videos about screen printing.
I decided I would do this and started gathering together equipment and supplies all while working a job I was hating. By the time mass layoffs hit my department in 2013, I was emotionally locked in on making t-shirts.
Now I’ve been doing it for 12 years. The business has grown so much and I still have fun everyday. So much of our business is from repeat customers and it has all come to us by word of mouth. I worked for years in jobs I hated, but in hindsight, I can see that I was picking up all of these skills that I’ve been able to use to make Chelsea Printworks a going concern. I love figuring out how to do things. I love working directly with people to develop their idea into a finished product. I like learning something from every piece of work that I do.
T-shirts pay the bills and take up most of my time, but I also dabble with letterpress printing. I’ve got two vintage presses (from 1907 and 1913) that I’ve restored and use to make greeting cards. This has become the equivalent outlet to the robots fighting sharks shirts from the beginning of the story. I sell those cards on etsy but would love to expand that part of our business into retail shops.
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! When I started Chelsea Printworks, I set a figure in my mind and thought, when I’ve burned up this much money, I’ll go back to the corporate world. I shot past that number and well beyond, but I was hooked. I was loving what I did and getting better and better at it. Though it made zero financial sense, I was determined to keep printing. With 4 kids and no other source of income, it was a terrible risk. Now that things are going well, I have to marvel at the steely nerves (or total lack of sense) that saw us through the hard times. My wife (and business partner) Michelle, has been super supportive. I think she sees that I love this in a way that I could not love any other kind of job.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m patient and willing to walk a person through the process of getting their shirts made. That doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I’ve heard from so many people about bad experiences they’ve had elsewhere. That they didn’t understand their options and the person they were dealing with wasn’t able to help them. I had one customer tell me she was literally thrown out of another screen print shop for asking too many questions! Here, I’m the sales person, AND the customer service person, AND the guy who makes the shirts. It’s not a hard process, but I’ll still do what I can to make it easier. I feel like my customers find me easy to work with and I know that’s what will keep them coming back.
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
All credit goes to my wife, Michelle. She is my biggest supporter. I know I’m the most frustrating person in her life, and I constantly disappoint her with my short attention span and inability to get things. But, she’s never doubted me in doing this.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.chelseaprintworks.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chelseaprintworksllc/
- Other: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ChelseaPrintworks
