The Official ClassB Blog

Summer was an amazing time for us! Things have been so busy, its kind of nice to have it slow down to normal again. We are very sorry that we had to scale back 6 day rush and 9 day priority service during the busy season. Faster turnaround could have helped many of our customers out of a bad situation. We know you cannot control the kids and parents that wait until the last minute.

To address the busy time for this fall and next summer, we are adding a lot more capacity. Enough to cover the increase in business we had this summer. Plus a little more. We are hoping that we can even cut back our standard turnaround by a day. We will know after this fall if we can pull it off and this blog is where we’ll make that announcement!

Customers receiving orders in the past few days will notice a small change to the t-shirts. The line identifying the manufacturer (us) now has a /12345 after it. The new text reads ClassB.com/12345. The 12345 is the work order number. “What’s this?” you ask.

According to CPSIA, all products that can potentially be used by a child (12 yrs or younger) need to have manufacturer information and include testing information. We are including the URL to allow any end user of the t-shirts to see the required testing information. When you get your t-shirts, just type in that url and all the relevant testing data will be displayed. Cool, huh? This new law effects all screen printers of t-shirts that carry sizes that a 12 year old or younger might wear. (In other words, adult medium or smaller.)

This is starting with orders taken on August 1st to comply with the CPSIA deadline of August 14th. We had wanted to start even earlier but we were still working on the inside part of it. All data going back thru 2009 was added to the system. We made it with just a few days leeway, whew!

The great thing is that this system will later support any other CPSIA requirements for screen printed t-shirts.

We will be adding the url to ALL orders to protect you, the purchaser, the end recipients of the t-shirt’s and ourselves as the manufacturer. We feel its important to test products and make those test results public. The CPSIA is doing a great thing protecting all of us. Lead poisoning is not fun!

I am sure this will come up: Some people may not want the labeling on your t-shirts. It is a federal requirement, regardless of whether you are certain that a 12 year old will never wear the t-shirt. In the event that one does end up on a child, this labeling is the best thing to protect yourself and give peace of mind to the people that wear the garments.

As I mentioned in our last post, this summer has been our busiest ever. We blew away every record we ever held week after week. It was more than we expected and we experienced some bottlenecks as our quantity of orders exploded. Some of those bottlenecks were because our equipment can only run so fast.

We promised you that we would work on increasing our capacity during busy seasons. This week we took our first steps toward improving our equipment! We took shipment of a brand new M&R Sportsman screen printing press. We already had one of these amazing presses and wanted more. Now we have two of these fast presses feeding into our largest capacity dryer.

You might wonder how we got this 3,300 pound servo-driven t-shirt printing machine off the semi truck and into our building. We have a flat bed wrecker truck back up to the semi, then we use a pallet jack to load the crates onto the wrecker, then the wrecker drops it in place. After that, we uncrate it as much as necessary to get it inside the building.

Of course, this equipment is huge and we end up moving everything out of the way between the door and it’s final location. So new equipment throws the entire building into a state of disarray as we rearrange to clear paths to move everything.

In addition to this new press, we have also ordered another new dryer, some Kool-Mist stations, and a few pieces of equipment we’ll save as a surprise for a future post.

This is an exciting time for us, as we get to increase our capabilities in many different ways. Keep watching this space for more announcements.