Join the Sunday Club

 Williams and Shania Hughes tell us about setting up their print and embroidery business Sunday Club Print Co, operating sustainably and ‘giving it a go’

For Daf Williams and Shania Hughes, Sundays have often been the time to get together with friends for a ‘Sunday club’, as it’s called in Wales. “‘Sunday club’ is where you and your friends get together on a Sunday and do something fun, whether it’s going to the beach or going the pub,” Shania explains. When it came to setting up their own print and embroidery business, they felt that Sunday Club summed up what they wanted to achieve. “We wanted to incorporate that side of things because we do like to think that we are a fun, approachable business to come to.” And, as Daf adds, “there’s quite a few print studios out there with quite dreary names and we didn’t want to be one of those. We also wanted customers or clients to feel that they were becoming part of something rather than just feeling like a number.”

Eight months on from launch, Sunday Club Print Co in Cross Hands in Carmarthenshire is already thriving, providing direct-to-garment (DTG) and direct-to-film (DTF) printing and embroidery, some with on-demand fulfilment. The couple began the planning nearly two years ago as they were keen to return to Wales from London to be close to family and friends. “There are not that many opportunities where we’re from in South Wales for this type of thing so we decided to create our own company,” Shania explains.

Big ambitions

They briefly contemplated turning a spare room into a makeshift studio, but from the start they had bigger ambitions. “We wanted to invest in equipment that would grow with us instead of investing in smaller machines and maybe just one heat press,” Daf adds. “We wanted to invest from the get-go so we needed a bigger space.” Alongside their own savings, they were supported by a grant from Carmarthenshire County Council for equipment.

They drew heavily on Daf’s experience, mainly in screen printing but also DTG and embroidery. He learned his craft at streetwear brand and decorator Doomsday Co in Bridgend in South Wales, including training from garment decoration consultant and Images columnist Tony Palmer, before moving to band merchandise specialist Allotment Productions in Reading where he set up and ran the screen printing department. However, the idea of running his own business can be traced back to Daf’s childhood. “The story my parents tell me is that we drove past an industrial site every day on the way to school and I used to point at one of the buildings and said that was going to be my T-shirt shop. I’ve no idea why. I didn’t even know what screen printing was.”

Despite being adept at using automatic presses, Daf has had to postpone his dream of offering screen printing at Sunday Club Print Co. “The start-up costs are high, especially if you add in the belt dryer and consumables and getting the electricity [supply] revamped.” For now, they have opted for an industrial Epson SureColor SC-F3000 to handle both DTG and DTF and a Melco single-head embroidery machine, plus two Stahls’ heat presses for drying – all supplied by Amaya Sales UK.

One of Sunday Club Print Co’s own garments, which it sells on its Shopify-powered website

A stand-out supplier

In spite of his screen printing background, Daf knew of Amaya and had met its team, including sales director Julian Wright, at trade shows. “Amaya seemed like a stand-out company that really covered all the bases we required: embroidery, DTG and DTF. They just seemed the perfect people to go to from the starting point and they were so helpful from the first email that we sent, offering us help straightaway.” Shania adds that the Amaya team were helpful in recommending a printer based on Daf’s background, both on auto presses and on Brother and Kornit DTG machines. They suggested “something that was quick, that would keep him hands on at all times, something that could produce really vibrant prints, which is why we went for the Epson”.

Sunday Club Print Co’s adoption of an Epson machine also led to work with Epson UK directly. In February, the company used DTG to print a colourful Japanese koi fish design onto polo shirts for the Epson team to wear at trade shows, with placements on the sleeve and pocket as well as front and back. It also printed onto the backs of 22 hoodies – each with a unique design – for students at Epson’s new Textile Academy, where young people are shown how technology such as DTG printing can be used in fashion and textile design. “It was great fun,” Shania adds.

As it is early days, Sunday Club Print Co is open to any job, with no minimum order quantity (MOQ). “Our door is open to anyone who wants to get anything done,” Daf says. “From my experience seeing how other businesses operate, we went with the approach of no MOQ because I know how fundamental it is for some people to have that physical sample in their hand and I know that for some people meeting minimum order quantities of 20 or even 10 is not possible. They could be clubs of five people and we want to be accessible for everybody.”

Let’s give it a go

They like to play around with garment decoration techniques “for our own enjoyment”, says Shania. “If a customer comes to you and wants to know if you do puff embroidery or badges, we have the confidence to say that we can do that having trialled and experimented with it ourselves. We never want to turn around to customer and say we can’t do that.” They have been doing a lot of appliqué and mixing DTG or DTF with embroidery, Daf adds. “If a customer comes to us and asks us for something completely crazy, we can turn around and say, ‘Yes, let’s give it a go’.”

Jobs range from leisurewear and teamwear for sports clubs to caps and bags to workwear and band merchandise, mostly for customers around South Wales but the company has shipped products across the UK, which is the ultimate objective. Sunday Club Print Co already provides an on-demand print and embroidery service for start-up clothing companies, managing everything from websites and orders through to shipping straight to purchasers. “We always wanted to offer that service here, but didn’t think it would take off for a long time as there wasn’t the clientele for it, but it is working,” Daf says. “Although there’s quite a few print and embroidery studios around this area, on-demand is a new thing to a lot of people.”

Both Daf and Shania provide design services to customers as well as creating their own garments, sold via the company’s Shopify-powered website or at craft markets. “The shop is more of a creative outlet for us, putting our own designs out there and a showcase to the customers to show them what kind of stuff we can do. We try and experiment a bit more with what we put out for sale.” They use their best work to market the company using Instagram and Facebook, with TikTok due to be added. As part of plans to grow the workforce beyond just the two of them, they hope to recruit an in-house graphic designer to provide more support for customers.

The Sunday Club showroom – “every project starts with a conversation”

Sustainability credentials

Shania has picked up garment decoration skills quickly from Daf after coming from a background in environmental science, most recently working for an international oil response organisation in London. However, her experience has served the business well in its commitment to sustainability. It uses Epson’s UltraChrome Pro water-based inks and Madeira’s premium Polyneon Green threads, made of 100% recycled post-consumer PET bottles, and orders are sent out in re-used packaging. But it goes further thanks to their premises in the Parc Gelli Werdd low-carbon development. There are rapid charging points for electric vehicles and solar panels providing power to each unit, while an online dashboard gives data for monitoring electricity usage down to each socket. “We were very lucky to find a brand-new industrial unit that really aligns with us as a company,” Shania adds.

The pair favour more sustainable garment brands, recommending Stanley/Stella if customers are particularly conscious about tracing fabric back to the farm where the cotton is grown. The go-to brand is AS Colour because of its quality and ease of printing, and the business also uses Native Spirit and AWDis. Shania said they have welcomed the arrival of better-quality T-shirts at lower price points, such as the AWDis ‘Rethink’ T and AS Colour’s Block Tee. “People want good-quality products and, if you can offer them sustainable products at the right price, they will take that option. We pride ourselves on trying to guide the customer and recommend the best-quality products they can get within their budget. You don’t want them to chuck their T-shirt in the wash and it shrinks. We tend to go for the more quality products that they can wear over and over again.”

Embroidery on the single-head Melco machine

Current challenges and future plans

One of the biggest challenges has been trying to reassure customers about the quality of DTF. “There is still a stigma around here when you mention the word ‘transfer’,” Shania explains. “Everyone automatically thinks it’s going to peel off and be rubbish and feel horrible so a good proportion of our job is educating people on what DTF is and its capabilities. We love customers to come into the unit and look at the equipment themselves so they feel a bit more included in the process.” For this reason, the unit includes a showroom space at the front with a sofa and samples on rails, from hi-vis styles to sherpa jackets. “We really try and push for customers and clients to come here, have a chat with us in person, come to the workshop to see all the machines running and see how things are made themselves,” Daf adds. “We always say every project starts with a conversation, so what better place to do that than in person at the place where the project will take place.”

In the medium term, the plan is to add one or two more single-head Melco machines. There is “room to grow” within the existing unit, although Daf believes the dream of adding a screen printing press is up to five years away. “Neither of us has owned a business before, so learning everything as you go is an experience,” Shania comments. “Luckily we’ve hit the ground running. We had expected it to be quite quiet for the first couple of months as a new start-up, but somehow we’ve been pretty sustainably busy.”

While they want to grow the business, the couple want it to remain a fun, happy environment for staff and customers, Daf says. “We never want to become a standard run-of-the-mill print and embroidery company. We always want to be challenging ourselves and trying new techniques. In this industry, the routine is fairly similar every day but, in the same breath, completely different. You’re always printing different artwork in a different way on a different garment and I love that side of it.”

sundayclubprintcoshop.co.uk

Embroidered sherpa fleeces for Peak Performance Wales