Running Alien
The Stockholm Marathon is just around the corner and this time, just as for my last marathon, the TCS Amsterdam Marathon 2014, I’ve decided to print a t-shirt. This time I have even better reasons: I’m still trying to gather funds for the Dutch Cancer Society, KWF – see my campaign here, plus I’ve just got a mascot for the blog, so a printed t-shirt could help with some “guerrilla marketing”.
While in Cyprus printing a t-shirt was a simple business: a few hours for text only and 1-2 days for images and logos (and this at a small shop inside the My Mall Limassol), printing a t-shirt in the Netherlands proved to be a challenge so far.
Last year, after a few “it’s difficult”, “it’s expensive”, “it takes some time”, “you only want to print one t-shirt?” answers/questions coming from various shops, I’ve found out that Decathlon can help. I took my t-shirt and image to their shop at Bijlmer and in around 4 days I had it ready. Happy me!
This year I tried the same…. logical… right? Well, not really! Yesterday I’ve received a “ohhh! You want multicolor print? That takes about 1.5 to 2 weeks!”… try to imagine my face! I tried to reason with him that I only wanted a regular print: just some images and very little text, not a hand-made Rembrandt or Van Gogh, plus I told him about last year’s time frame. He smiled, but the outcome didn’t change…
Come back to office after wasting 1 hour and search for alternatives! Luckily one of my Dutch colleagues told me that lots of copy shops also print t-shirts. “Wow! Really? I didn’t know that! Multicopy has an office at WTC Zuidas!”.
Calling Multicopy produced the same outcome: apparently printing a single t-shirt is not interesting from a business point of view, although it’s not like they’d do it for free. Not sure what’s the logic behind that as I’d still pay for the service. Anyways…
I was almost ready to quit searching and visit a print shop at Leidseplein, but felt brave and took one more shot: I’ve called Printerette Spui (they have shops in lots of other locations). And lucky me they had no problem with the 1 week time frame and the multicolor print. Now I’m just hoping they’ll do a good job – I’ll come with an update next week 🙂 Fingers crossed!
Now, to end this story, I didn’t mean necessarily to complain, I just wanted to share my frustrations and adventures while trying to print a running t-shirt. Hope my experiences will help others who may want to do the same and don’t know where to start. How about you? Did you ever print a technical t-shirt in The Netherlands and if yes, where and how easy was it? Any tips & tricks that could be useful?
Til next time, happy running!