Today marks 10 years of Ink’d Stores.
I say it out loud and it still doesn’t sound real.
Ink’d started with an idea and willingness to keep showing up. Long before we had a warehouse, or clients like Crocs or DoorDash, it was just a printer, a lot of trial and error, and a dream to do things better.
Back then, we didn’t even know what “better” meant yet. We just knew we wanted to make things people actually cared about. Not swag for the sake of swag, but something thoughtful, something done right.
The first big break came from a small pop-up store in Mansfield Crossing back in late 2015. We signed a 45-day lease, packed up two beagles, a truck full of boxes, and moved into what was basically an empty shell of a space. We painted the walls ourselves, built the shelves, laid the floor, and opened the doors. We even had a guy dressed as a penguin outside waving at cars to bring people in.
People came. They bought shirts and hats, told us what they liked and what they didn’t. We listened. We printed late, cleaned early, and figured things out one problem at a time. The pop-up was supposed to last 45 days, we stayed for years. That was the start of Ink’d.
Before that, I’d tried a few things that didn’t quite work. I once built a company that printed gym gear: medicine balls, yoga mats, and the works. I thought it was the next big thing. Turns out, people own ten shirts for every yoga mat they’ll ever buy. It failed, but that failure was probably the most important thing that happened. It taught me two things: listen to what people actually want, and don’t quit just because something doesn’t stick the first time.
So we pivoted. We focused on apparel, t-shirts, hoodies, polos, uniforms, the things that connect people, that tell a story. And we kept listening. Churches started calling. Schools. Breweries. Local businesses. Then came the bigger names. Each new client came from a relationship, word spread because we kept our word.
We didn’t have fancy systems or investors. What we had was persistence. There were nights when the website crashed in the middle of a fundraiser and we stayed up until 3 a.m. printing shirts by hand, using pizza boxes as drying racks. There were times we lost power in the middle of the holiday rush and packed orders by flashlight. We’d work straight through weekends to make deadlines, because people were counting on us.
And that’s what Ink’d became about, not the product, but the people. The people on our team who show up every day and make things happen. The people who’ve believed in us since the pop-up days. The clients who took a chance on us before we looked like a “real” company.
Now, ten years later, we’ve printed over one million shirts. A million. It still blows me away. Because every one of those shirts represents something, a story, a team, a launch, a memory. They’ve gone out to schools, nonprofits, Fortune 500s, and small startups trying to make their mark. And behind every single one, there’s a person here who cared about getting it right.
Ink’d is a decade old now, but the heart of it hasn’t changed. We still believe in doing good work for good people. We still care about the details, about earning trust one order at a time. We still love seeing a client’s reaction when their product arrives and it’s exactly what they envisioned, or better.
When I think back to that pop-up store, those early failures, the long nights, and now standing here at ten years and a million shirts later, I don’t feel proud in the flashy kind of way. I feel grateful. Grateful for the people who walked through those first doors. Grateful for the team that became family. And grateful that we get to keep doing this, together, the right way.
Here’s to ten years of hard work, good people, and plenty more stories still to tell. Jay Sapovits
