The owners of Fortitude Valley screen printing business, Strait Jacket Press — Robert and Michelle Chalender — have two very important words they want you to remember: “Screw digital!”
Established in Newcastle, Robert and Michelle have spent eight years designing and producing low-cost, high-quality custom screen-printed shirts, posters and other merchandise for garage bands. “We started in our backyard,” Robert says. “We were ‘garage’ printers — there were a lot of bands that were in the Newcastle area and they were having a hard time finding shirts that were affordable. So we started printing for a few of these garage bands just to help them buy instruments and get gear; we did it really on the cheap. We designed Strait Jacket Press mainly to help cater to that part of the industry that was being lost with the major print shops.”
In July of last year, they relocated their business to Brisbane, setting up shop in the heart of Fortitude Valley, providing fledgling Brisbane garage bands with their unique design and artistic expertise, as well as personalised customer service. “We really take the time with a client to get something out there,” Robert says. “We kind of have a motto: ‘we’ll print anything, just tell us and we’ll pull the squeegee’. You dictate to us how you want it on a shirt, whereas a lot of print shops just tell you, ‘this is the way it is, this is how we do it and it’s going to cost you this much money’.
“We really scaled that back and said, ‘how can we help the guy who doesn’t have any money, how can we help him get something on a shirt?’”
Aside from providing local bands with affordable professional-grade promotional merchandise, Robert is also helping to preserve the dying art of manual screen printing with weekend classes. “I think there’s something about an automated and digital world that is going to kill the music industry, for one, and it’s going to kill the art … [with manual screen printing] you can actually go up and feel the detail, the textures on these pictures and you’re just not going to get that with digital [screening].”
Strait Jacket Press is located at 124 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley; open Mon-Fri 9am-4pm.
