An early incarnation of this thriving London garment decorating company involved deliveries by donkey, a far cry from the sophisticated manufacturing processes it employs today
When Charlie Scott was relaxing in the Tunisian sun by his T-shirt shop in 1990 it’s doubtful he would have been predicting opening the state-of-the-art, 8,500 square foot factory he now runs in Charlton.
The company, London Print Service, can print, embroider and transfer onto all manner of things, from T-shirts to tents, from umbrellas, jackets and bespoke boxes, to mugs. They’ve even printed onto collapsible wheelbarrows, but the core business is definitely the T-shirt.
London Print Service also operates a couple of websites offering designer clothing – Compass Clothing (compassclothing.co.uk) and fivepoundtee (fivepoundtee.com).
It all started with Charlie’s curiosity about putting a design on a T-shirt, back in 1978. Knowing nothing about printing, he started experimenting.
“I made a stencil out of wax paper, dipped a toothbrush into fabric paint, and sprayed the paint, using my thumb, through the stencil,” he says. “It looked good, but took about three hours to make one T-shirt design. I thought, there must be a better way than this. I got a book about screen printing, and taught myself.”
At that time he had a clothing shop in Brighton – the city’s first punk shop – and started selling designs to a growing customer base. The eighties were a fruitful time, with fashion changing constantly and rave culture offering a great platform for T-shirt printing.
He and his wife then decided to move to Tunisia for a change of lifestyle. Based on the idyllic island of Djerba, he started screenprinting for the local tourism industry.
“I first started off trying to offer 16th century Islamic designs – which the Tunisian shopkeepers thought really boring,” he says. “So I designed a Walt Disney-inspired fluorescent camel, which people went crazy for.
“The first delivery of T-shirts was by donkey and cart, and our first workshop was a basic garage with a sand floor courtesy of our new friend Chedli. The whole family came to watch my every move and clapped as I printed the first shirts.
“Before long we were in demand all over the island, selling hundreds each week during the summer. It soon became too many to cope with and we needed a factory to help with the printing. We then moved to Blackheath in 1996 due to a family bereavement and started all over again. This time I got involved in the promotional game, setting up premises in Woolwich and then Greenwich.
“We offer a personal service, very good quality as well as a very keen price – whether you want one t-shirt or 10,000. We’ve grown steadily, and have now recently moved again, to where we are now by Asda and Sainsburys in Charlton.”
The operation employs 20 people, screen printing, embroidering, transfering and DTG – ‘direct to garment’, the new kid on the block, where you’re ink jet printing onto fabric.
Screen printing offers vibrant colour, and the company has lots of special effects, such as metallics, reflective ink and ‘puff ink’, which produces a raised image. There’s also ‘discharge printing’ where the dye is removed from a garment, resulting in a much softer feel on the garment.
The company print for a number of big-name brands, as well as promotional items for the film, theatre, sport, music, tv and events industries. They also offer a complete branding and fulfilment service, labelling, bagging, tagging and storing.
So if you want that special personalised T-shirt done as a birthday surprise, or a whole new clothing range to launch – be sure to check out the one-stop shop right on your doorstep!
London Print Service Unit 1, Ramac Way, London SE7 7AX; 020 8854 1111;londonprintservice.com