I still print. That is the whole point.

I am Jesse Poteet. I have been printing since 2017 and I run Alpine Apparel Co, a water-based screen printing shop in Castle Rock, Colorado, out of my own building. Before that I spent four years as a graphic designer and production manager at a small shop in Cleveland, Tennessee, which is where I learned the craft and got opinionated about it.

Twenty-five-plus years of that was as a designer. That matters more than it sounds, because most of the expensive mistakes in this trade are not printing mistakes — they are artwork, pricing and process mistakes.

The third thing I do is build software for print shops, under Operator Stack. It started because I got tired of watching my own customers wait three days for a number, so I built the ordering system Alpine runs on. Other shops had the same problem, so now I build for them too — websites, Airtable systems and custom apps, plus a few products of my own. I am a certified Airtable builder, and four of those apps are in production right now in shops around the country.

Why I started publishing

When I was starting out, the information I needed was either locked behind someone's paid program or flatly wrong. Forums argued about ink. Nobody explained how to price a job so it paid a real wage, or which press was worth the money, or what to do when a customer wanted 12 shirts and your minimum was 20.

So I started recording what I figured out. That became a YouTube channel with 120+ videos, then a course, then two communities. None of it is theory. It is a working shop's notes, published as I go.

What I actually believe

Most shops do not fail at printing. They fail at pricing, at buying the wrong equipment early, and at never working out where customers come from. The squeegee is the part you can learn from a video in an afternoon.

Free should be genuinely useful. The channel and the Toolbox are not teasers with the good part removed. If you never buy anything from me, you should still be further along for having watched.

Small is a legitimate goal. Not everyone wants an automatic press and six employees. A one-person shop that pays you properly is a real business, and most of what gets taught quietly assumes you want to scale past that.

What I am not

I am not a full-time educator, and I am not going to pretend the shop is bigger than it is. I run one press. When I tell you something works, it is because it works at that scale — and I will say so when advice depends on being bigger than I am.