Dream Evolves into Successful Online Business

“I couldn't spend the rest of my life in a cube,” said Tiffany Ursch of her new online business.

Tiffany is one of four entrepreneurial friends who have recently launched , a T-shirt and textiles print shop based in High Ridge.

Tiffany, her husband Matt, and Ryan and Alicia Brand formed Evolve Screen Printing last March after dreaming of owning their own business. Tiffany, Ryan and Alicia have been friends since their days at Oakville High School.

“We work together perfectly,” said Alicia. “Ryan and I are artists, Tiffany is good at marketing and Matt is a jack-of-all-trades,” she said.

“I feed the shop cat,” joked Matt, who in fact handles the printing press.

Like a lot of “Generation Y” entrepreneurs, the foursome would rather take a risk on their own ingenuity than continue working for someone else. “We wanted to be self-employed,” said Matt.

Evolve has no brick-and-mortar storefront. They meet clients “in the field” at coffee shops or at their own businesses.

Evolve’s owners are also extremely tech savvy and use the Internet and social media to promote their store, sell their products and stay current in the latest industry trends.

“We grew up on the Internet, which makes this all possible,” added Alicia. They handle orders by email and phone and use an online catalog to display products they can print for customers. Being paperless helps them keep their promise of running a green business. They also stay green by using only environmentally safe inks and chemicals and small orders can be delivered in reusable shopping bags.

Evolve started in late 2010 when Tiffany, Matt, Ryan and Alicia got an idea to produce a line of T-shirts. The idea grew to custom screen printing after the foursome decided to pool their resources and buy a used press in order to manufacture the shirts themselves.

Screen printing is still a labor intensive process as computers can only assist so much. An artist creates images with a computer drawing program and prints out a transparency, which is used to create screens for the printing process. Each shirt is hand printed by pushing ink through the screens, then run through a flat dryer.

“It’s a 100 percent manual process, so there’s a lot of quality control,” said Matt. They inspect each shirt as it’s printed to guarantee a high quality product. Matt says their typical run is around 10 to 50 shirts, though they can easily do hundreds of shirts within a standard two-week turn around. Shorter runs take much less time and they do not have a minimum size order.

Besides T-shirts they also print on jackets, sweatshirts, bags of all types, hats and towels—anything made of fabric.