General April 2, 2025

Why We Created the Screen Print Collective

Jesse Poteet and Jennifer Sanderson built the Screen Print Collective for printers who need real answers, not another forum thread. Join the waitlist.

If you have ever tried to learn this trade by stitching together YouTube videos, old forum posts, and half-answered Facebook comments, you already know the problem. The techniques are learnable. Finding someone who will actually answer your specific question, on your specific press, with your specific ink — that is the hard part.

That is the gap the Screen Print Collective is built to close.

Why I built this

I have worked with printers at every stage — people printing their first shirt in a garage, and shop owners who are established but stuck, unable to figure out why revenue is up and profit is not. The thing almost all of them are missing is not more information. It is somewhere to bring the specific problem they are stuck on and get a specific answer back, from someone who has actually solved it.

That is different from a course. A course teaches you a process once, and you are on your own after that. It is different from a Facebook group, where your question gets buried under someone selling merch blanks. The Collective is meant to be the place I wish existed when I was dialing in exposure times at midnight with no idea if I was close or hours away from getting it right.

Jennifer Sanderson

I am not building this alone. Jennifer Sanderson of Pigskins & Pigtails is my partner in this. Jennifer brings creative printing and technique refinement experience that fills in gaps in my own — I run a one-press, water-based and DTF shop and think about this business from that angle. Jennifer’s background covers ground mine does not. Between the two of us, most of the questions members bring get a real, specific answer, not a guess.

That matters more than it might sound like on paper. A lot of printing education comes from one person’s perspective, which means it is also limited by that one person’s blind spots. I know water-based ink and DTF on a single press inside and out. I do not have the same depth on some of the specialty and creative techniques that Jennifer works with regularly. Putting the two of us in the same room, answering the same member’s question, usually gets you a more complete answer than either of us would give alone.

Who this is actually for

I want to be specific about who benefits from this, because a membership community is not the right fit for everyone. If you are printing your first few shirts and still deciding whether this hobby becomes a business, the free YouTube channel and the Screen Printing Toolbox will get you further, faster, at no cost. Start there.

The Collective is built for the printer who is past that stage — you have a press, you have run orders, and you are hitting specific, recurring problems that generic content does not solve. Things like: your registration keeps drifting on multi-color jobs and you cannot pin down why, or you have priced your work three different ways and you are still not sure you are actually profitable, or you are ready to bring on your first outside help and do not know how to structure that. Those are the questions that need a real conversation, not another blog post that covers the basics again.

What is actually inside

The Collective is built around a few things that only work because it is a membership, not a one-time purchase:

Monthly live trainings. Jennifer and I take on real problems members are dealing with that month, plus a live Q&A where you can ask about your situation directly instead of hoping a blog post happens to cover it.
An on-demand video library. Short, specific tutorials — not padded-out hour-long videos. If the answer takes four minutes, the video is four minutes.
A community forum. A private space to post the question you have been sitting on, and get an answer from people who actually run presses, not marketers guessing.
Member-only content. Behind-the-scenes looks at how Alpine and Pigskins & Pigtails actually run, including the parts that do not make it into a polished YouTube video.

Where things stand right now

I want to be straightforward about this: the Collective is not open for new members at the moment. It runs at $20 a month, and right now it is waitlist only. When space opens up, people on the waitlist get first access before we open more broadly, and you will hear from us with the real details on pricing and start dates at that point.

I would rather tell you the honest status than oversell an open door that is not actually open. If you sign up for the waitlist, you are not committing to anything — you are just making sure you hear first when a spot is available.

If you have been looking for a place where the answer to your printing or business question does not depend on which forum thread you happened to find, this is being built for you. It is not fully available yet, and I would rather you know that now than find out after trying to sign up.

What to do next

Go to https://screenprintcollective.com and join the waitlist. That is the only accurate next step right now — there is no “join now” button that does what it says, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. While you wait, the YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/@startupscreenprinting and the free Screen Printing Toolbox at https://screenprintingtoolbox.com cover a lot of the same ground and cost you nothing to start using today.