As I mentioned in our last post, this summer has been our busiest ever. We blew away every record we ever held week after week. It was more than we expected and we experienced some bottlenecks as our quantity of orders exploded. Some of those bottlenecks were because our equipment can only run so fast.

We promised you that we would work on increasing our capacity during busy seasons. This week we took our first steps toward improving our equipment! We took shipment of a brand new M&R Sportsman screen printing press. We already had one of these amazing presses and wanted more. Now we have two of these fast presses feeding into our largest capacity dryer.

You might wonder how we got this 3,300 pound servo-driven t-shirt printing machine off the semi truck and into our building. We have a flat bed wrecker truck back up to the semi, then we use a pallet jack to load the crates onto the wrecker, then the wrecker drops it in place. After that, we uncrate it as much as necessary to get it inside the building.

Of course, this equipment is huge and we end up moving everything out of the way between the door and it’s final location. So new equipment throws the entire building into a state of disarray as we rearrange to clear paths to move everything.

In addition to this new press, we have also ordered another new dryer, some Kool-Mist stations, and a few pieces of equipment we’ll save as a surprise for a future post. ;)

This is an exciting time for us, as we get to increase our capabilities in many different ways. Keep watching this space for more announcements. :)

The eight weeks leading up to July 4th is typically a busy time for us and this year did not fall short. In fact, we’ve beaten all of our past records for orders in-house. The last three weeks are our #1, #2, and #3 weeks of all time.

This is exciting for us, particularly because so many of our orders are from long-time customers. It makes us feel good to know we’ve done a good job for you in the past, and that you’ve trusted us once again with your order.

This explosion in business makes us a little worried, though. At the beginning of the year, with the economic conditions as they were, we did not hire as many people nor upgrade our equipment like we normally would. We didn’t know how the economy would affect our industry, our customers, and our business. We braced for the worst and, by playing it safe, we have created a new problem.

While we are doing everything we can to keep up with business and provide excellent service to each and every customer, we know we could be doing better. Even with most of us coming in early each day, staying late most nights, and working on the weekends, it simply hasn’t been enough. We’ve read your surveys and emails and we know that we aren’t doing as good a job as normal of keeping you informed about the status of your order. We’re shipping your orders out faster than normal to reach deadlines and, for a few orders this summer, we haven’t met your deadlines. For that we are truly sorry.

Even our online t-shirt designer was affected. We simply never tested it under the kind of traffic it has been receiving and it turned out there was a bottleneck that caused it to break when there were too many people designing t-shirts at the same time. That’s fixed now, and we’re planning more upgrades to speed it up.

Please know that we are adding more staff every week and training people as quickly as we can to accommodate the increased business. We’re not accepting rush or priority orders until we are back on our normal schedule. We are also planning on equipment upgrades to do a better job during our next busy season.

We view this as an opportunity and we’ll spare no expense to increase our capacity as quickly as possible. We are working hard to continue to earn your loyalty and trust.

We’re excited to announce the official launch of the ClassB™ Facebook page and ClassB™ Twitter profile.





On each we post neat stuff that we’re doing and the awesome stuff that Scouts are doing. Plus, we’ll be posting occasional promotions on each service that are exclusively available to people who are fans/followers. Add us now so you don’t miss out! :)

We started making swatch cards while back. Why? Many people want a true representation of the color of the t-shirt. Everyone knows what Red is, but not many can tell the color of Avocado. This is especially an isue for packs with Navy and Royal and Troops with the various shades of khaki: Prairie dust, tan, and sand.

So we came up with a clever way of showing the color of the shirt. We take business cards with the product info and attach little tiny t-shirt cut outs of the color. We originally were going to print the info on the tiny shirt shaped pieces, but any tiny crookedness or twist looked horrible. We did have lots of fun with trying how to print the small T-shirts. Can you spot one thats not crooked?

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Its hard to find one that is not crooked. Well we ended up with sticking it on a business card.

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To get them, you register on the site and then you can get up to 4 swatches. Why not more? The little things cost a lot to make and the cost for a full set of all colors is around $31 – ouch! So we figure we can give them away for free, as long as we keep the total amount we send out reasonable.

We think these will help people who are unsure which color to pick or are trying to match an existing color. A computer image or photo of shirt fabric just does not do the same thing.

We will be posting some new T-shirt designs on the trading post for sale in the next few days. Here is a preview of the upcoming designs:

We will hopefully be also selling these thru the online scout store, Tradingpost.classb.com

While we were working on the Eco-T program, we came across a cool gadget for measuring power consumption. A thought came to mind as the breaker tripped for the 100th time, how much power do the computers actually use? I bought one of these:



Its a Kill-a-watt, an energy use measuring tool. We plugged it into some of our computers and measured how much energy they use. We made some interesting discoveries that have led to some very significant changes in our energy consumption.

We have a variety of computers here, some older G5 Power Macs, many Mac Minis and the newest computers are intel iMacs and Mac Pros. The average power consumption at very low load of an older G5 Powermac tower, both sans monitor was 6x the power usage of a Mac mini! As far as power cost goes, that a yearly $165 vs $29. One of the G5 Powermacs was a quad processor, a water cooled monster that was our old server. It has a $389 yearly cost to operate! The iMacs with monitors come in at $115 per year. LCD Monitors cost $60-110 to operate per year depending on size and make.

Our computers have to be on all the time, so sleep was not an option since the connection to the server would be severed in a bad way. So we looked into having the server connections sleep before the computers sleep. We installed a script that achieved this and set the majority of the stores computers to sleep when the store is closed. This should shave off 60-70% of our energy consumption. The difference between a G5 Powermac and a intel Mac Mini was so dramatic that we decided to retire 4 of the older towers and replace them. We sold them on eBay for even out dollars for the minis but will cut power usage to 18% of the original usage!

We have one PC in the store that we measured, an Alienware. OMG, it was just as bad as the Quad G5, $345 a year. We will stick with mac minis whenever possible.



I love these little computers, they are the best! I cannot wait for the next revision, we are going to replace 5 of our older PowerMacs.

We have about 30 Macs at the office and the overall savings in power usage is huge, all of this just by taking a little time and looking at how we can reduce our impact. We saved money and electricity! By the way, the mac minis are faster than the G5 Powermac towers, a total win, no matter how you look at it. Now that we know how much a computer can use in power over its lifetime, we will take that into consideration when choosing our upgrades.

If you’re thinking about buying a Kill-a-watt, there’s a small design flaw we noticed. It needs a small extension cord to be able to twist and see the readout. We picked some up at Target and they worked great.